Flight Deck Operations 1802

      I was musing, remembering today about my time working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. I remembered how dangerous it was on our own E-2a with their giant turbo-props spinning on the flight deck and preparing to launch. I was no hero up there, just never gave it much thought. I had to ensure the crew’s communication gear was working and everything was ready to launch and then I could leave the plane, latch the door and try to stay away from the props as I went back to the island on the deck. The first cruise still had the old AD-5 aircraft that were used to electronically jam North Vietnamese radar and fire control stations. The AD-5 was a wide-body version of the AD attack planes. They had a giant single propeller. The E-2 and the AD-5 were always the first to be launched because they had enough fuel to stay in the air for hours, unlike jets that nearly always needed aerial refueling to get to their mission and get back. The E-2 and the AD-5 were always on the angle deck catapults, furthest away from the island leaving me a long trek back to relative safety. It was one thing to do the job in daylight, but I was always on the night shift from 7pm to 7am. So I was almost always working in the absolute darkness with nothing but a red light flashlight unless I forgot it or the batteries went dead. Even with the flashlight there was just a narrow band of red light. It was scary to be close to those props, hearing them and being able to feel the air they drug into their direction. During launch and recovery the carrier was always turned into the wind, bringing 30-50 mile an hour winds over the deck. Combine that with the draw of the props and I had to lean into the wind to avoid them. Imagine trying to dodge these propellers as I had to do at night.

      Below is an AD-5 so I had to pass the plane above and this one below to get to safety every night during air operations.

      Now back in WWII all the planes were propeller driven and the flight deck was full of them all jammed together on the aft-end of the deck. There were no catapults, so every launch was a deck launch. They would fill the deck 4 or so abreast. The flight deck crews had to run the gauntlet across all those spinning props. There are no statistics on how many sailors were killed by spinning propellers, but every contact with a rotating prop results in death. The WWII carrier planes were all taildraggers (no nose wheel, just a small castor-like wheel under the tail) and the pilots could not even see what was in front of them when sitting on the deck. Pilots relied on plane directors to guide them into position to launch. The pilots did not really have any steering like we think of today. If they needed to turn left they stepped on the left brake and the plane’s motion would turn them. A right turn was accomplished by pressing on the right brake. Landing required equal pressure on both brakes. Landing on a carrier, planes had to catch one of the arresting wires. If the pilot missed the wires he would run into a huge net that could twist the plane every-which-way but loose. Sometimes the plane would nose dive in the net. That was never good. The prop would be ruined when it hit the deck, bending or breaking and sending metal flying into the air and endangering everyone on the deck in danger. The sudden stops would cause the engine to stop with force seizing it which would destroy it and often start an engine fire and spilling high-octane aviation gas to ignite on the deck. In those days there were deck crewmen who had to push the planes from the landing zone up forward to the bow for storage until all the planes landed. They had to be on the open deck and rush out there to push the planes out of the way so those behind them could land.

      Most of the times all the planes were low on fuel and could not wait too long before having to ditch in the ocean beside the ship. There were no helicopters then to pluck pilots out of the water, so they had to wait for the destroyer plane guard ship to lumber over and pick them up from the water.
There were no night landing operations in that war due to the danger of enemy bombers seeing lights and attacking the carriers. There were a few minimal post sunset landings during the battle of Midway, but those were the only time I heard of them. The torpedo bombers (they were more dangerous to pilots than to Japanese ships) were stripped of torpedoes after Midway due to the loss of more than 40 of them (in one day) during the battle and not one hit on a Japanese ship. Later the carriers would launch the torpedo planes just before dawn so they could fan out and scan the areas around the carrier to ensure there were no Japanese planes in the air. (The few ships that had radar only had a range of a few miles, not nearly enough for detection in time to do much.) The torpedo planes did have machine guns to ward off Japanese bombers until the carrier’s fighter planes could get into the air.       Even today jet blast from the powerful twin engines moving and turning on deck during operations can blow an unwary flight deck worker into the steel nets at deck edge or blow a man completely off the deck and while the blast can cause some burns, hitting the water 80 feet below can be like hitting concrete with a belly flop landing.