Navy Deployment

I am not sure how the conversation began, but it got around to me being away from home when I was in the navy. Going out from San Diego on carrier qualifications was not bad. We would be out for a week or two off the California coast launching and landing planes, mainly for the pilots to practice. We being just off the coast, if the new pilots could not make their landing on the ship (after two tries) they could fly back to a naval air station nearby.

Once they would get into the gulf of Tonkin there were not any Naval Air Stations to fly into. There was Danang in the south, but in the early days we were operating up north. Jets use a lot of fuel and after a strike pilots were low on fuel. We had air tankers, but they would often give up their supplies topping off jets going in country and not have a lot left for those jets returning. After two tries and not being able to make an arrested landing on the ship, those pilots were pretty rattled and needed to make it to shore and rest until they could try again the next day.

The problem with landing on an aircraft carrier is a basic one. The pilot does not want to come in low. The aft end of the flight deck has a rounded slope. If he hits slightly low the tires may give him a bounce and he will miss the arresting wires. If he hits lower, it’s crash and burn time, so pilots come in high and if they are too high they miss the wires or get waved off by the landing and signal officer. If they hit the deck and miss the wires, then it’s full throttle and hope they have airspeed enough to lift back off the deck, if not they end up in the water. I have seen several planes that disappeared off the end of the deck and were out of view for a mile or more before I could see the plane slowly gaining altitude. Besides the challenge of landing a plane that is falling out of the sky at 160 mph and hitting the right spot, often the deck is not only moving forward, it is also moving up and down. If that isn’t bad enough, the pilot has to hit close to the center of the wire that is only perhaps 120 feet wide. Too far left and he goes over the port side, too far right and he heads toward parked planes or the island superstructure, neither of which was a good thing.

I started this piece simply as a remembrance of sitting on the round-down of the Kitty Hawk watching San Diego disappear for the next 8-9 months on a western Pacific deployment and explaining what a round-down was and I got carried away talking about landings. Navy pilots that land on carriers have to be the best in the world because there are no other landing conditions as difficult that I know of anywhere else and those guys do it over and over again.