F18 Carrier Launch | Jonathan Ladd Austin, Texas

So this might be the coolest thing I have ever witnessed as of yet.  If not, it's definitely one of them.  Unfortunately, the video doesn't do it justice, but it's what I have to work with. 



I'm a civilian with an office job, hardly an expert on seafaring military hardware, but what little I learned on my short voyage was fascinating and made me even better appreciate our military, its capabilities, and its people, for which I already had a substantial appreciation to begin with. So watch it then read this...or read this and then watch it.  Either way, there's some interesting things to note:

First off, the sheer scale/size of a modern day American super carrier is, in of itself, a sight to behold. The USS Ronald Reagan is 1,096 ft long and has a displacement of 101,400 tons...which is just a fancy way of saying "it's really damn big."  But just saying that it's "really damn big" is a slap in the face to the engineering marvel that is CVN 76...or really, any American super carrier.  It's a floating city.  Literally.  Complete with its own police force and firefighting crew.  Thousands of people have to eat, sleep, work, shower, pee, and poop on this mobile fortress for 6-9 months at a time.  Sometimes longer.  I'm no expert on any of this stuff, so I couldn't even try to relay the details of everything I saw and learned that day if I wanted to (which I don't).  Suffice it to say, it's a big operation which requires lots of people who know what the hell they're doing to make it all work as wonderfully as it somehow does.  Ok?  Ok.  Moving on.

What you need to know is that even at over 1,000 ft long, neither the Reagan or any other carrier is long enough to facilitate a take-off or recovery (what we civilians call a "landing") without the aid of a catapult (for take-off) and..er...arrest cables (for landing).  I'm not sure if the technical term is actually "arrest cables," but that's what I'm going to call them for the purposes of this discussion. 

Now unfortunately, I didn't get any video of a recovery as my camera memory was low, but video of it is easy to find elsewhere and the concept isn't too hard to grasp anyway: when the plane lands, it has a hook on its tail (called a "tail hook," duh) that hopefully grasps a group of cables which line the deck perpendicular to the jet's direction of movement, thus forcing it to stop against the tension of said cables.  Notice I said the tail hook "hopefully" grasps them.  That's because catching the cables may not necessarily happen.  In fact, sometimes it doesn't (which I had previously never thought of as a possibility for some reason; I guess that's why I don't design aircraft carriers).  

This guy missed it.  Also, those aren't bombs, they're fuel tanks.

If a pilot were to maintain his/her approach speed (which is relatively low) and then miss the cables, he/she would then roll off the front of the ship because at that speed, it's not fast enough to launch back into the air.   

So what do they do to guard against this possibility?  When the pilot hits the deck on a landing, he/she then throws the engines full throttle just in case the hook doesn't catch the cables, allowing for enough forward movement to immediately get airborn, fly back up, come back around, and try again.  FYI, when they practice this maneuver (which they do a lot), it's called a "touch and go."

This means that during a successful landing, the cables are holding the plane in place against the full thrust+forward velocity of an already moving jet being propelled through the air by its two powerful jet engines.  Now obviously, once the pilot figures out that he/she did indeed catch the cables, they pull the throttle down.  But the fact that the cables withstand that much resistance, if even for a second or two, in order to accomplish a successful landing frankly blew my mind.

So that's landing.  Taking off, the plane needs the assistance of a steam-powered catapult that moves it from 0 to like 170 mph in 3 seconds.  And that's with the use of the engines.  Think about that for a second.  Even if you have a fast car, your best acceleration is what, 0 to 60 in 3-4 seconds or something like that?  Again, I'm not an expert on cars or jets, but the appreciable difference in acceleration is obvious even to a boring desk jockey wordsmith like myself.  Needless to say, the pilot is pulling some major G's on takeoff.

Another thing I learned is that when launching, the carrier crew will (if possible) orient the forward movement of the ship against the current direction of the wind and speed up.  Why?  Well, it helps to move the air under the planes' wings at a faster rate and with less effort, making it easier to launch.  Think of it as giving the jet a "running head start."

All of that said, there's a lot more that happens just to launch and recover aircraft, and that doesn't even cover everything else that's going on within the ship at a given time.  But again I'm no expert, and I'm not trying to write a book here.  I'll just say it was a privilege to have the opportunity to take a ride on the ship and I'm glad I got to shoot the video of the launch.