I’m curious about the liferaft use aboard aircraft carriers. I’m pretty familiar with naval aviation and for those who aren’t the liferafts can be seen here as the line of small white canisters ringing the flight deck.
So how are these supposed to be used in practice? You release the raft, it inflates, and you…jump? Wait for the ship to settle? Seems a little sporty at best.
I’m pretty sure you just answered your own question. They operate just as you described (they also launch automatically if the ship goes down).
Abandoning a carrier would probably not be a very organised deal in an extreme emergency - each crewman is assigned a life raft station, but I’d assume it’d end up being every man for himself.
I don’t know about that. Maybe if by “extreme” you mean the ships jet fuel stores exploded, the reactor melted down through the hull and the ships broken into five burning pieces.
If the sinking of the Lexington and the Yorktown are any indication, you answered your own question. Both ships were abandoned in good order, with sailors sweeping the ship for wounded and slowly sliding or diving into the sea. The rafts were close enough that the wounded could be transferred to them with little problem, and the crew were in the rafts only until the support ships of the task force could accomodate them. Remember, carriers don’t sail alone.
Yes, the release mechanism for those liferafts are either manual or pressure switches that should release them when they get down to 25 or 50 feet depth.
Just like the highly effective liferafts on the Estonia.
I may be being excessively cynical, but I suspect they’re really no better than window dressing. The chances of a warship being able to use such has always seemed to me to be a bit dubious.
Certainly the loss of the Yorktown is currently taught as an avoidable loss - had the crews been better trained in damage control, and knew the lessons that had been learned by the end of the war, it’s unlikely she would have been lost. For that matter, the Forrestal fire offers a more modern example of just what sort of things a ship can survive. More extreme, to my mind, is the fact that the Stark didn’t sink, in spite of having her keel broken.
It’s not an absolute rule, of course, but it does seem to me that unless a vessel is in immediate hazard (Such as the Ex USS Pheonix, or the USS Indianapolis) a good naval crew always has a good chance of controlling the damage and keeping the vessel afloat. I think it’s fair to assume that any sinking of a modern bird farm is going to be a chaotic, and desperate mess.
And don’t expect many engineers to get out in that case.
I recall seeing footage of WW-II soldiers descending on large nets when transferring from troop ships to amphibious landing craft. I don’t recall if it was newsreel footage, or Hollywood stuff. Even if it was Hollywood, there is a chance this is how it was actually done.
I don’t know that that represents the normal mode of getting into the smaller landing craft, but it is accurate for being one of the ways it was done. Here’s a link to a photo showing troops going down a cargo net, like you describe.
No, the ships that were putting troops over the side to get into Higgins boats w\ere fitted out especially to handle the nets and the sailors aboard were trained and drilled in securing the nets, then dropping them over the sides in a way that would minimize their chance of fouling. Simply hanging a bunch of nets from the hangar deck of a carrier in the off chance that the crew would need to scamper down the sides in an emergency would not be practicable. (It also required a fair amount of training for the dogfaces to use the nets effectively to allow them to get down to the boats without getting trapped in the nets or losing their grips and crushing/peeling off the men below them.)
As a “what if” the idea is not stupid, but as to being a practical solution, it is not.
On Royal Navy ships at reasonable intervals everyone on board including people in transit practiced abandoning ship in mid ocean by hanging over the side from the top wire rail and then letting go to drop feet first.
We were specifically told not to dive over the side in case of wreckage floating beneath the surface.
Even from a destroyer the drop was quite a plunge so from a carrier deck I would imagine
your fall would be quite exhilarating.
In shark frequented waters we were a little bit tense not from fear of the sharks themselves but from the shark guard on the upper deck, a sailor with a rifle.
An R.N. sailor with a weapon is like a gorilla with an axe, an opinion shared even by his naval comrades.