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Why does an aircraft carrier have 3 or 4 arresting cables?
It takes skills and nerves of ice for a US Navy pilot to take off and land an aircraft on a carrier’s flight deck, essentially a miniature airfield, that is pitching, rolling and yawing in rough seas which these ships operate in.
Landing aircraft on a flight deck of an aircraft carrier is made possible through the use of arresting cables installed on the flight deck and a tailhook installed on the aircraft.
Modern carriers typically have 3 (Midway Class and Gerald R. Ford Class aircraft carriers) or 4 (Nimitz Class Aircraft Carriers) arresting cables laid across the landing area.
Why is that?
US Navy pilots aren’t perfect
Adam Daymude, former US Navy EA-18G Growler pilot, explains on Quora;
‘Because, despite our bravado, US Navy pilots aren’t perfect. I had massive amounts of confidence with regards to all of our missions. Dogfighting…you’d have to have a really good day to beat me. BVR (beyond visual range)…lol! Nah! You probably won’t even get a shot off. In all strategies, I win. It’s been tested with and without our shiny toys for weapons. We win, quite easily I’d add.
‘But that above? Instant humility.
‘The following aren’t humble brags. They’re an illustration of how hard some of the things I’m comparing it to are. I did research with Nobel laureates and was a thesis write-up away from a Ph.D. in Neuroscience (don’t get me started on why letters aren’t after my name) from Johns Hopkins University, at the time the #1 Neuroscience program in the world (at least by some measures…we never could figure out what the criteria were). In the Navy, I casually memorized 30 or so emergency procedures verbatim and could execute them blindfolded…literally. I got bored in a simulator testing program, shut my eyes, and practiced reaching the switches I needed to move with my eyes closed. Never missed. Hell! Somehow, I raised 3 kids in the social media age and none of them are beaten up by what gets sent their way. Very confident children.
The great equalizer
‘But landing at the boat is the great equalizer. We may screw up and that screw up could be centimeters…literally. Your left hand, which controls power with the throttle, is constantly moving to correct or maintain what you see on the ball. A centimeter too far forward on the throttle and you’re gonna miss all wires (called a bolter) and you’ll get to try it all over again. A centimeter too far aft and you’ll have the entire boat screaming at you to wave off: you cannot land safely from where you are. That’s just the throttle! Every adjustment you make with the stick with your right hand is just as important as your left hand.
‘American Football is a game of inches. Landing at the boat is a game of centimeters, and quite honestly millimeters separate the best pass from the worst.’
Daymude concludes;
‘So, to answer the original question of why there are 3 [or 4] wires, we just aren’t that good to touch down within a thirty foot span to have just one wire. We need more wires for redundancy. Try this outside. Mark your starting point, take ten strides forward and mark that spot. With one wire, that’s your landing area…in a fighter, going 150 mph, coming down like a sack of bricks, on a precise 3.5 degree glideslope. Good luck!!!’
Photo credit: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class E. T. Miller / U.S. Navy
