Carrier landings
Discussion
A fair bit I'd imagine, the French send their carrier pilots out to the USA to learn their trade
I interviewed a French Navy Rafale pilot a few years ago & we talked about him coming back from a long mission landing in bad weather at night on a rolling carrier & he was asked what goes through his mind whilst approaching that kind of situation, his response:
I should've joined the air force!
I interviewed a French Navy Rafale pilot a few years ago & we talked about him coming back from a long mission landing in bad weather at night on a rolling carrier & he was asked what goes through his mind whilst approaching that kind of situation, his response:
I should've joined the air force!
Simpo Two said:
My guess is that a conventional carrier landing is easier to learn than a vertical one, where a whole new set of dynamics come into play.
That's not the view of the ex-FAA Sea Vixen, Bucc and Phantom pilots that later made the transition to the Sea Harrier.But, yes, I always thought that we should have gone cat n trap with the new carriers, or not bothered. The reduced options for cross-decking is a massive limitation, even more so if USA's view of the world does dramatically change, as the whole point of the carriers in the Blair Govt view when ordered was for joint expeditionary ops with the USMC.
Somewhere there must be statistics for the losses of cat & trap takeoffs & landings vs V/STOL fixed wing at sea. My gut feeling is that V/STOL has less losses. Cat & trap has the added disadvantage that if either a malfunction of the arrester gear or a damaged aircraft blocks the deck, and can't be pushed over the side quickly, other aircraft airborne may also be lost.
Having said that, it does seem madness that we have spent so much on ships that can only operate one manned, fixed-wing 'fighter jet' type, unless we drag the Harriers from the museums. What if the F-35B was found to have an issue which grounded them for a bit?
Having said that, it does seem madness that we have spent so much on ships that can only operate one manned, fixed-wing 'fighter jet' type, unless we drag the Harriers from the museums. What if the F-35B was found to have an issue which grounded them for a bit?
Edited by GliderRider on Monday 26th May 11:51
The next USN jet trainer will not be carrier capable. They have decided that it is now that easy with ACLS (Magic carpet) that pilots don't need to qualify on deck landings until they reach their unit. I heard that during trials the ACLS was so accurate the hook strikes were wearing a hole in the flight deck, so they needed to dial in some inaccuracy to prevent damage of that single point. They want to make carrier landings as repeatably easy as every hour practicing just getting back aboard is an hour they could be practicing weapons delivery or tactics. Similar logic in making the flight controls as easy and idiot proof as possible - the pilot can allocate more brain power to winning the fight, without having to worry about departing controlled flight because of some mishandling of the aircraft.
TL;DR, it used to be hard, but now it's not.
TL;DR, it used to be hard, but now it's not.
LimaDelta said:
The next USN jet trainer will not be carrier capable. They have decided that it is now that easy with ACLS (Magic carpet) that pilots don't need to qualify on deck landings until they reach their unit. I heard that during trials the ACLS was so accurate the hook strikes were wearing a hole in the flight deck, so they needed to dial in some inaccuracy to prevent damage of that single point. They want to make carrier landings as repeatably easy as every hour practicing just getting back aboard is an hour they could be practicing weapons delivery or tactics. Similar logic in making the flight controls as easy and idiot proof as possible - the pilot can allocate more brain power to winning the fight, without having to worry about departing controlled flight because of some mishandling of the aircraft.
TL;DR, it used to be hard, but now it's not.
I work for 22Gp looking at training for aircraft engineers in the future. TL;DR, it used to be hard, but now it's not.
One of the concerns is that with the cost of operating these latest generation fighter aircraft and future generation we can see a point where a pilot may only fly for a couple of hours a month as the simulators are so good and so realistic there is in effect no need for them to fly for real for any training purposes.
This of course means from a maintenance perspective there will be less rectification and just more scheduled / preventative maintenance. How will our engineers get the hands on skills and background knowledge gained from actually working on aircraft.
We are even looking at the consequences of the point where aircraft are purchased and parked up only ever to be rolled out to fight actual wars.
When I was aircrew (Sentry E3-D) I regularly used to participate in huge NATO war games with hundreds of pilots and crew from all over NATO flying simulators all linked together from all over the world together.
We are already doing full simulated wars so within 10-20 years time this will be the reality. It will all be autonomous drones or piloted drones for actual wars all controlled by people sat in simulators.
I imagine the Americans are already at the point where they have realised they don’t need a training aircraft capable of landing on carriers, it can all be simulated. Our F-35s don’t have two seats. The first time a pilot flies one and lands on a carrier there on there own and it’s all been trained in the simulator. There is no need for a carrier trainer.
LimaDelta said:
Similar logic in making the flight controls as easy and idiot proof as possible - the pilot can allocate more brain power to winning the fight, without having to worry about departing controlled flight because of some mishandling of the aircraft.
TL;DR, it used to be hard, but now it's not.
'F1' comes to mind too...TL;DR, it used to be hard, but now it's not.
rallye101 said:
There's a great clip on tinternet somewhere of a us nany pilot coming in to land on a carrier when all the lights failed on the deck, he brought it in on the trail of photo plankton churned up by the the carriers props!
I heard that story attributed to Neil Armstrong.Simpo Two said:
I heard that story attributed to Neil Armstrong.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/11/jim-love...Found it, Jim Lovell....
MB140 said:
I work for 22Gp looking at training for aircraft engineers in the future.
One of the concerns is that with the cost of operating these latest generation fighter aircraft and future generation we can see a point where a pilot may only fly for a couple of hours a month as the simulators are so good and so realistic there is in effect no need for them to fly for real for any training purposes.
This of course means from a maintenance perspective there will be less rectification and just more scheduled / preventative maintenance. How will our engineers get the hands on skills and background knowledge gained from actually working on aircraft.
I'm at the other end of your chain, doing the hands-on training of phase 3 folks and Q-Courses etc, and we've all already seen a huge push into the "de-skilling" of service members from engineers to maintainers to box changers over the past few decades, as we rapidly gave up 2nd, 3rd & 4th Line rectification to civilians (which decreased training time so folks hit the frontline faster) and the current push seems to be heavily into augmented reality (AR) where the future RAF 2040 maintainer will wear a set of AR glasses and these will show them exactly what to do, even down to simple tasks like highlighting which panels to remove and which tools to use, with errors raised for incorrect usage etc.One of the concerns is that with the cost of operating these latest generation fighter aircraft and future generation we can see a point where a pilot may only fly for a couple of hours a month as the simulators are so good and so realistic there is in effect no need for them to fly for real for any training purposes.
This of course means from a maintenance perspective there will be less rectification and just more scheduled / preventative maintenance. How will our engineers get the hands on skills and background knowledge gained from actually working on aircraft.
I'm "old school" enough to have a real concern about this level of change. It's not just de-skilling, but the enforcing the attitude of "don't think for yourself, just do what the tech tells you to do" which everyone knows is always, 100% of the time a recipe for disaster when something outside the scope of the AR program occurs, or we somehow lose all AR functionality (EMP, hack, no power etc despite being promised it'll never fail).
Sadly, for me at least, its always high level Officers sat behind desks with zero IRL engineering experience that are the ones making these decisions because it "looks cool" during a nice, safe & very restricted tech demo, and therefore they end up pushing their desires down to everyone else below irrespective of the risks that a military uniquely comes across and, being military, everyone does their absolute best to "make it work" when the best plan would be the opposite in most cases.
But I'm just a grumpy old curmudgeon now I guess, yelling at the sky
I remember when Kwik-Save supermarket cashiers had to memorise the price of every single item in the store. This was before bar codes and saved the company money by not needing to employ someone to label their products with a price gun. Can you imagine asking a present day supermarket cashier to do that now?
IanH755 said:
MB140 said:
I work for 22Gp looking at training for aircraft engineers in the future.
One of the concerns is that with the cost of operating these latest generation fighter aircraft and future generation we can see a point where a pilot may only fly for a couple of hours a month as the simulators are so good and so realistic there is in effect no need for them to fly for real for any training purposes.
This of course means from a maintenance perspective there will be less rectification and just more scheduled / preventative maintenance. How will our engineers get the hands on skills and background knowledge gained from actually working on aircraft.
I'm at the other end of your chain, doing the hands-on training of phase 3 folks and Q-Courses etc, and we've all already seen a huge push into the "de-skilling" of service members from engineers to maintainers to box changers over the past few decades, as we rapidly gave up 2nd, 3rd & 4th Line rectification to civilians (which decreased training time so folks hit the frontline faster) and the current push seems to be heavily into augmented reality (AR) where the future RAF 2040 maintainer will wear a set of AR glasses and these will show them exactly what to do, even down to simple tasks like highlighting which panels to remove and which tools to use, with errors raised for incorrect usage etc.One of the concerns is that with the cost of operating these latest generation fighter aircraft and future generation we can see a point where a pilot may only fly for a couple of hours a month as the simulators are so good and so realistic there is in effect no need for them to fly for real for any training purposes.
This of course means from a maintenance perspective there will be less rectification and just more scheduled / preventative maintenance. How will our engineers get the hands on skills and background knowledge gained from actually working on aircraft.
I'm "old school" enough to have a real concern about this level of change. It's not just de-skilling, but the enforcing the attitude of "don't think for yourself, just do what the tech tells you to do" which everyone knows is always, 100% of the time a recipe for disaster when something outside the scope of the AR program occurs, or we somehow lose all AR functionality (EMP, hack, no power etc despite being promised it'll never fail).
Sadly, for me at least, its always high level Officers sat behind desks with zero IRL engineering experience that are the ones making these decisions because it "looks cool" during a nice, safe & very restricted tech demo, and therefore they end up pushing their desires down to everyone else below irrespective of the risks that a military uniquely comes across and, being military, everyone does their absolute best to "make it work" when the best plan would be the opposite in most cases.
But I'm just a grumpy old curmudgeon now I guess, yelling at the sky
I then went on to Herc C130J, this was a right culture shock for me. The computer spat out a 10 digit error code and you typed that number into the dataset and it would spew out a fault diagnosis tree. Even if we knew what the fault was we weren’t allowed to deviate from the fault diagnosis tree.
Even by then you could tell that they had really really started to dumb down the training. We were getting guys through that didn’t know half split, couldn’t diagnose stuff and just followed what the computer said.
I recently saw a TIF for someone who was asked to go and take an oil sample and had drained fuel out of a fuel tank because they genuinely thought they were the same. Some of the TIF we see are shocking.
Oh and this wasn’t the F35 which does actually have fueldraulics (fuel used as hydraulic medium).
MB140 said:
Even by then you could tell that they had really really started to dumb down the training. We were getting guys through that didn’t know half split, couldn’t diagnose stuff and just followed what the computer said.
Its no different in the civvie world. I now find it a struggle as you have to explain the simplest of stuff to not only younger people but also most of the management level above, as they are part of the new "you don't need to have any technical understand of the job to be able to manage it" mantra......
Yeah, right oh
So looking forward to retirement some time within the next 12 months.
rallye101 said:
Simpo Two said:
I heard that story attributed to Neil Armstrong.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/11/jim-love...Found it, Jim Lovell....
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