Good stuff Navynuke99. It must be fun to be on the bridge watching the flights come on deck, arm, and then launch.
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If I have time tonight, I’ll share some of my pics from Vulture’s Row. That’s a gallery level in the island, several decks above the flight deck, we could watch operations from. The rest of the time, if I was watching flight ops, it was when I was on watch in Central Control, watching the Flight Deck TV monitor we had down there for the Engineering Officer of the Watch and other supervisory engineering watches. Knowing what’s happening on the roof helps us anticipate what we’ll need to have downstairs for pumps, spare electrical capacity, or making sure nobody upstairs is about to try and do something stupid that could break the ship.
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Is es correct, you will never see a Launch and Recovery circle at the same time on a carrier?
Depends on how many planes you have aloft, and what all is going on. It is possible to launch and recover at the same time, especially if you have a lot of extra space on deck, using the bow cats, or maybe one of the bow cats to also give some parking space, to launch, and keeping the waist clear for landing. You can launch off usually cat 3 if I remember right on the waist as well if you really want / need to, but that’ll have to fit in with recovery operations.
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Do I see the opportunity for historical context?!
Back in the olden times (we’re talking straight decks here), this was the operational flow of a carrier. During launch operations, aircraft would be brought up from the hangar using the aft elevator, armed, fueled, and then would take off over the bow. During recovery operations a barrier would be erected ~1/3 to 1/2 from the stern. Landing aircraft would catch a wire at the stern, the deck crew would unhook them, the barrier would be lowered, and the aircraft would be pushed forward and either spotted to make space for more, or immediately taken below to the hanger using the forward elevator. If you missed all the wires, the barrier should prevent you from careening into parked aircraft forward.
This system starts breaking down in early 50s, because jets ruined everything. Between their heavier weight, faster landing speeds and slow engine response times, it becomes readily apparent they’re not suited to the existing style of straight deck carriers. They are more likely to botch an approach, and where colliding with a giant volleyball net at 70 MPH in your Hellcat or Corsair is fairly safe bet as far as things go, smashing into it at 100 knots in your Panther is not. Best case: your jet is down for a significant maintenance event. Worse case you, and potentially others, end up very dead. God help you if you try and wave off during any of this.
The solution to all this is the angled deck, which works well and good. I don’t need to go into how it solves the killing-yourself-and-others problem, but of note it also increases the surface area of the flight deck. This is a moderate improvement on the Essex and Midway rebuilds, and the Forrestals, being the janky boats they are don’t really run with it either, but in the Kitty Hawk class an onward, you see a fairly substantial increase in the real estate to park aircraft up top. At the same time, the size of aircraft operating from carriers drastically increases throughout time. The net effect of this is it’s no longer practical or really even desirable to keep sizeable portions of aircraft below in the hanger deck. You now have the space to park them up top where they can be rapidly prepped for their mission, and you can maneuver them in this space without the severe impact on operations you would on a pre SCB Essex or Midway carrier. As @Mbot points out, the hanger transitions from the defacto home of the carriers air wing, to an area to perform extensive maintenance.
You can, but you almost certainly under specific circumstances. Simultaneous launch and recovery means you can only use the area of the flight deck forward of the island and inside the recovery foul line for both preparing, marshaling, and launching jets, as well as parking recovered aircraft. That places tight constraints on the amount of aircraft you push through the system at a given time. It might work for continuous air ops where you constantly have singletons and pairs of aircraft returning periodically (think a light CAP or ASW aircraft). Anything more than that and you simply don’t have the space to do it in a timely manner.
For that reason (and @Navynuke99, @Hangar200 or @boomerang10, feel free to correct me), the carrier usually divides operations into alternating cycles of launch and recovery. For, say, ninety minutes the carrier will launch aircraft, and for the next ninety it will recover them. Aircraft launched during a launch cycle will have a corresponding recovery cycle they’re slotted to make. This allows an acceptable throughput of aircraft (i.e. aircraft launched or recovered in a given time), as well as allows the CVW to arrange the supporting elements it needs (such as the recovery tanker).
As for how all this pertains to DCS? I’m extremely curious. The plans they’ve outlined seem pretty solid, but I’m curious to see if they handle the different cycles, or even how they could. Especially in an MP environment. It’ll be interesting to see for sure. Especially because older carriers like Heatblur’s Forrestal, or even the Kuznetsov, are not as conducive to sustained simultaneous operations as the bigger Nimitz’s are.
Right, going back to sleep now.
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So, sort of.
Launches and recoveries will normally be scheduled for the same time but the recovery won’t start until the launch is mostly complete. Generally all the waist cat launches need to be done with just the bow cats to go. Daytime Case 1 you’re stacked overhead literally watching the deck to know when to come in for the break. Night time or Case 3 ops they’ll give you an approach time that will put you landing at a time they expect the deck to be able to catch you.
All this makes study of the airplan - the document that details air operations for the whole day - crucial during your preflight planning as the size of the launch and recovery will determine how long you’ll actually be airborne after your scheduled recovery time. You can expect about a minute per launch so if you’re recovering after a 20 plane launch, you know you’ll be airborne for at least 20 minutes after your scheduled time, which you then must account for in fuel planning. Flying around the boat is more of a fuel-time problem rather than a fuel-distance problem like it is back home.
Typically cyclic ops will involve Event 2 launching just before the Event 1 recovery, and so on.
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At what point in the evolution does Air Boss express his desire for posteriors, preferably delivered in a rapid manner?
Seriously though, that’s super informative. I’m working off a half remembered reading of Clancy’s Carrier (which I need to re-read).
Ah! Yes… That one just made my required reading list. Thanks!
So, those of you in the know… What happens if you launch, and need to recover again, ASAP, due to a failure…?
If it’s a land ASAP type scenario, which does happen from time to time, you do whatever you gotta do to clear the landing area. It generally involves towing the parked aircraft blocking it but it’s managable to just recover the one aircraft.
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Not that I know, but I think in this case the aircraft would have to wait, possibly hitting the recovery tanker, until the deck has been rearranged to recover aircraft. I guess it is part of the dangers of naval aviation that landing is only possible at certain times.
As for simultaneous launch and recovery, it seems to me that even on the Nimitz class the only totally unrestricted catapult is the starboard one at the bow, as the jet blast deflector of the bow-port catapult seems to violate the foul line.
Eh, the way to get around that is you can keep wings folded and the JBD down if required until the jet recovers.
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I’ve heard it over the J-dial to the EOOW, because we were restricting the fill rate for the accumulators, slowing down the launch rate. Because, you know, reactor safety.
Emphasis on “If possible” - sometime the winds change. Four words a naval aviator hates to hear when getting ready to recover is “Mother’s in a turn”
Yep you are spot on as far as running elevators were is a max speed in the ballpark you mentioned. Even then a ship can encounter a “rouge wave” and wash guys/yellow gear overboard - I remember it happening to CVN-69 (I think) in the mid 1990s.
I’ down here inHampton Rads so I see te carriers in pI can’t be sure but based
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As it happens, recent episodes of the Fighter Pilot podcast covers carrier ops.
Episode 11 for instance, “This week, on the first installment of a multi-part series exploring aircraft carriers and air operations on them, former USS Carl Vinson ‘Big XO’ Captain Eric, “Pappy” Anduze, US Navy, joins us to explain just how big these carriers are, how fast they go, and how operations safely take place in the hangar bay and on the flight deck.”
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So if the steamers are getting it… Soon?
I’m out of town next weekend - with my luck it’ll drop next Friday.
Replay: Twitch
He has a CloseALPHA (2.5.2.x) - this is either the press version or the EA version build.
It sounds like they have quite a lot to do before beta.
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Wonder what kind of system he is using? I just skipped through to random parts of the video and it looked like the FPS was pretty low. And then it got real stuttery and choppy. Wonder if it was the map or the module? Either way both are probably two weeks out.
also running a stream, that means a hefty encoding and buffering task for the machine on top pf the sim itself. i wouldnt read too much into that.