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.
The pilot aims for the middle arresting wire, which is either the second or third depending on the configuration of the carrier. Upon touchdown, the throttles are advanced to military/full power for three seconds. This is done to keep the engines spooled and providing thrust in case a bolter (missing every wire, go-around) occurs or even for the unlikely event of a cable snapping. Afterwards, the throttles are reduced to idle, and the hook is raised on the aircraft director’s signal (CLICK HERE to read why naval aviators advance throttle to full power when they land on an aircraft carrier).
Given this complexity, can the autopilot be used to automatically land a plane on an aircraft carrier?
Adam Daymude, former US Navy EA-18G Growler pilot, explains on Quora;
‘There is an inherent refusal to accept autopilot as the method for recovery with Navy pilots. I will be the first to stand up and say “He’ll, no!” On a nice calm day with natural wind of 25 knots or so, the auto pilot is amazing. It fails spectacularly under other conditions.
‘A pilot will look at the wake of Mom and will know what that wake means for landing. I’m here to tell you that unless they’ve massively improved auto-recoveries in the ten years I’ve been out, I would never trust full auto pilot. Setting auto-throttle, which will try and keep you on speed, was a bust. I flew auto throttle for half a cruise…around 100 landings and no problem. On landing 101, auto throttle tried to kill me by pulling power at the exact moment that I needed to add power. So, 1% of the time, my trusty steed is going to try and kill me.’
Daymude concludes;
‘Manual landings are still the safest way to recover. We’ve tried, me in particular working with our simulator software development team, to build an algorithm that works in all situations. How do you tell a software engineer why you added power at a specific moment when it didn’t look like you needed it, but turned out to be the right correction at the time? I literally shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t know! The plane seemed to want to descend.” That’s called seat of the pants and you can’t model it easily.’
Photo credit: U.S. Navy
Aircraft Carriers
