if a few more falls off the boat, we will have erased all the savings the Federal gov’t got from DOGE! 
and he will have to increase our taxes to recoup.
And we won against the Houthis.
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Doing what Navy aviators do is incredibly dangerous.
There was a horrific incident on the Lex, some years after I was on board.
Steve
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Steve, with your naval-carrier experience, what are the possible reasons for planes falling off the ship ?
I haven’t followed this, have just seen the headlines.
Are they missing the target on the landings ?
Or is it something else ?
Did the new SOP of eliminating any appearance of woke or dei come into play ? I mean the sec-def can’t even follow the most basic comm security standards, is this attitude permeating down to the flight deck ?
iirc, the first one to go overboard was lost because the ship rolled while the crew was moving it in the hangar. Inertia and gravity took control and the plane, and tug, went out the hangar door.
On the latest incident, the plane was trying to land. Reports are “unclear” whether the plane missed the wire, or if the wire failed. The old straight deck carriers had about 16 arresting wires, as there was no such thing as going around, if you missed a wire. With the angled deck, they only use 4 wires, and, the pilots are supposed to throttle up as they hit the deck, so they have enough speed to go around if they miss a wire. Besides pilot error, like the guy on the Lex, who stalled, there is mechanical failure. The son of a friend of my aunt’s was on the Coral Sea. One day, their mail plane was taking off, and the cat didn’t work. The plane just rolled down the deck and into the drink.
This video compares Air Force and Navy landing styles. Air Force, with the luxury of a two mile long runway, tiptoes in. Navy, with only about 300 feet of “runway”, takes a more definitive approach. The first time a plane landed, while I was in the hangar, I thought some major structural part of the ship had broken, due to how loud the WHAM was, from the plane’s impact on the deck.
One from the Steve archive, an A7 trapping on the Lex. Pretty good job of capturing that moment, with my cheapie Instamatic.
Steve
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