On 02/07/2014 22:02, Jeff Crowell wrote:
Coupled landings are still possible but not common--the pilots
hate them for a number of reasons, and in truth there is little
motivation or incentive to do them except in extreme need--every
pass you automate is one less practice pass for you, the driver,
and someday, when you most need it, the system will go down at
one end of the link or the other, leaving you with the options
you've always had--land the damned thing by hand, or, if you can,
bingo to the beach. Option b) is sometimes just not possible.

It was interesting to go through a 1980s NATO publication on aircraft
capabilities (outdated, long superseded) and note how badly carrier
aviation suffered from the assumption of "must have enough fuel left to
divert to a base ashore, nominally X(lots) miles away, after a few
bolters or a foul deck" in payload and radius terms.

That was very much a peacetime assumption based on a fixed rule (and, as
an older and wiser analyst pointed out, one reason it looked
unfavourable was that the carrier might be far closer to the problem
than the nearest reliable land-based field, indeed might be the only
place to fly from with any chance at all of getting the aircraft or at
least the pilot back...)

However, it did highlight the point that getting back onto the birdfarm
is a challenge and can't be assumed to be simple and easy, even if in
wartime the answer might be "dry your eyes, Princess, and keep trying
until you get it right, crash on deck or flame out... and if you crash
on deck and don't die, I'll kill you myself!"

I heard an anecdote that, for USN pilots at the time, the most stressful
part of strike missions over North Vietnam was landing back onto the
carrier at or after dusk... don't know whether it's true but I'm
prepared to consider it.


Still a believer in carrier air, though, and HMS Queen Elizabeth gets
officially named on Friday which is a welcome move. (And I even know her
first CO, even if only on slight nodding acquaintance: Jerry Kyd was an
ace student on HCSC, well regarded as CO of Ark Royal, and liked and
respected when he ran BRNC Dartmouth)

--
He thinks too much, such men are dangerous.