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Carrier landings gone wrong...


Trooper117

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8 hours ago, Jason_Williams said:

So many crashes on landing. I cannot even fathom the stress of that in real life and the sheer amount of danger. 
 

Jason

When I was flying, we had in our club organized a precision landing competition, where you would be evaluated about what distance (right or left did not matter) you would touch down from the runway center line, and what distance from the main runway threshold marking you touchdown with your main landing gear. In this latter case if you are behind the line then you have failed, and is measured only the distance if you touch down on it or in front of it. And you must not after touch down bump back in the air and touch down again this will again fail your attempt. The further the distance in both cases, the lower your mark will be.

This kind of training and competition is a lot of fun, and does make a lot of sense in Switzerland where runways are very short and narrow compared to US. And we always learn flying patterns with high precision in the three dimensions as our various circuits and mainly landing circuits holding circuits etc. are extremely tight because of the high density of population, and so many associations immediately complain if you just went meters (yeah meters) out of your circuit allotted space. Yes you have retired citizens in those associations that just have all their time to pass their time tracking the planes and checking that they are spot on. 

This is also true for take-off and landing. The reason is due to height constraints of your circuit due to noise regulations. So the take-off slope and landing slope have also to be tightly respected as you often fly over populated areas.

From all this I could assume that we would have a good basic training to land on carriers. I say basic because we are used to fly in a precise way, but  that to finalize our carrier landing capability we need a rolling runway on X an Y axis and going a little up and down on the Z axis and  that is receding from us as we approach at a certain speed. I am too old now but I would have loved to add such a training. As we do not have any seas and carriers we excel in mountain flying, and the Swiss jet fighter pilots are one of the best in the world in flying in high altitude mountainous terrain (Alps), which also requires very tight and precise flying.

 

 

 

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11 hours ago, Jason_Williams said:

So many crashes on landing. I cannot even fathom the stress of that in real life and the sheer amount of danger. 
 

Jason

Yes mate... get it wrong and it's not just over shooting onto the grass, it's slipping over the side or worse, the bow, and probably not surviving...

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  • 2 weeks later...

The tragic story of Brian Bell Irving. My grandfather was training to fly the TBM Avenger for the Flight Air Arm during the Second World War but the war ended before he could see combat action however he remained in the RCAF reserves and knew Irving. When he was landing his F2H Banshee on the HMCS Bonaventure his brakes failed, it swerved off the deck, Irving ejected a fraction of a second too late and ejected straight into the sea.

https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/canadian-virtual-war-memorial/detail/80002761

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19 hours ago, BlitzPig_EL said:

Land based aircraft did operate from Midway during that fateful battle.

F2A Buffalos

F4F Wildcats

USMC Vindicator dive bombers.

USAAF B26 and B17 bombers.

As far as I know there were several Dauntlesses too. Badly trained pilots whom made shallow dive attacks with disastrous result. 

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