Pilots: You can land a 767 on an aircraft carrier

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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You might recall this thread Could a Tu-95 Bear bomber be landed on a Nimitz class carrier? from a few months ago.

Well recently I landed a 767-300 on the Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) http://www.reagan.navy.mil/. Just simulated of course, but you can both land successfully and take off again.

One of our full motion full video full fidelity super-duper sims has a carrier steaming across Boston harbor. It’s sort of an Easter egg in the sim’s world model. My partner and I had finished our semi-annual checkrides and we had a few minutes of sim time left when the instructor/examiner asked if we wanted to try carrier landings. For a smart guy, he sure asks some dumb questions.

My partner had flown A-4s off carriers, but nothing bigger. The empty weight of a 767 is 11x the maximum gross weight of an A-4. A bit different. I’d never had the opportunity to do carriers before.

So the IP set our airplane up with almost no fuel and zero payload. And configured 50 knots of headwind aligned with the carrier’s landing zone. Unlike the real world, the harbor stayed glass-flat and the ship deck had no motion except sliding smoothly over the water into the wind. And there are no other aircraft on the deck. The ship’s island and other masts are there in pretty good detail, but that’s it.

The technique is pretty simple, but takes real good timing. Land pretty slow even for that light weight, aim to put the main gear just at the start of the deck, pop the spoilers just before impact, don’t flare, then apply full reverse thrust with full autobrakes. The impact was not gentle on us or the sim. Then as you’re rolling down the landing zone, grab the taxi tiller & steer right towards the bow.

Done perfectly, you stop with the cockpit hanging off the bow of the ship and the nose gear about to fall off the bow.

The A4 guy ran off the bow the first time but made it work on his second try. I landed short once, ran off the bow once, and made it work the third time.

I can’t say for sure the real airplane landing gear would have survived those impacts, but it sure was fun. Landing short or rolling off the bow would have been catastrophic for sure.

For a takeoff, you reverse all the way back until the main gear is about to fall off the stern. It had taken the IP a lot of trial and error to learn the landmarks you can see out the forward-facing cockpit windows that correspond to the main gear being in the right place.

Done right you’re lined up at the stern and on the centerline of the landing zone. With brakes locked, set our short-field flap setting, run the engines up past max to emergency power, then release brakes and hold on. As you run off the end of the landing zone amidships, not at the bow, rotate the nose up a bit and hold on. The other pilot instantly raises gear and flaps as the airplane sinks towards the water & catches in ground effect. A few seconds later the speed has built enough that you can climb out of ground effect and away you go. :smiley:

Don’t tell the boss.

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Absolutely awesome.

I know nothing, NOTHING!

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Fun to read about.

Anything else unorthodox you guys do in the simulator? Is it a faux pas to propose a game of Jihad Joe?

How do simulators compare to those you used in the past, all the way back to the 80s?

Given that the hull costs are likely now that significant a proportion of carriers cost and that they’re powered by a reactors, I wonder how big and costly they would have to be to accommodate B-52s, B-1s, B-2s or even C-130s modified for bombing. I realize that the length may be quite different for each of these.

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Does the simulator simulate the arresting cables / net on the carrier? (not that a 767 has a hook, but maybe the landing gear could catch it?)

Brian

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Yeah, and the Navy acts like it’s really hard to land on a carrier, at night, in rough seas, deck pitching 20+ feet, with a thunderstorm off the port bow.

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I wonder how much your wing missed the island by. I thought width/wingspan would make it impossible.

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No cables or net. In any case the gear would roll over it. Which is exactly what happens with the much smaller wheels/tires on real Navy airplanes on real Navy ships.

I’m not for a moment suggesting real world carrier landings are anything other than stupid-difficult.

I was surprised too, but if you read the TU-95 thread we checked that issue out with real measurements / estimates, etc., and discovered it was a total non-problem The latest carriers are real wide; much wider than Billy Mitchel had to contend with.

Now in our sim session we did have to land on the angled deck, then turn right after we passed the island. I don’t think there’s sufficient width to land straight down the deck and reliably clear the island.

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Aileron rolls are common & easy.

The sim has a feature to save training time which doubles or triples the ground speed. The legit use is to “fast forward” through the boring parts without gross unrealism appearing on the instruments. The illegitimate use is to try to fly instrument or visual approaches to a landing at speeds up to around 1000 knots.

Unlike the airplane, the sim will also fly approaches and landings inverted. It’s a real mind-fuck, especially in the clouds because many of the instruments behave sorta backwards / inside out compared to normal. If you don’t get too far off centerline it’s not that hard. But once you get well off track in any parameter it’s pretty common to make a backwards input and auger in.

We also do various Sully-like all-engines-failed landings from plausible or implausible setups.

The latest sims can generate other traffic in the arena, including intruders that try to collide with you for practicing evasive manuevers. It’s fun to set one of the non-colliders up to fly an approach and landing then try to be his wingman all the way to touchdown.

It used to be fun to fly through downtowns and maybe or maybe not miss all the buildings. That one is Just Not Done nowadays.

The first T-37B sim I used was built in the 1950s; the “logic” was vacuum tubes, motors, and gears; it had no visual (of course); and was pitiful in every respect. But if you could fly that bitch anywhere near precisely, you could fly anything.

The modern ones are simply miraculous. And we’ve seen everything in between.

The aircraft carrier was invented as a way to carry short-range aircraft close enough to the enemy to be able to inflict damage. Even today that’s all they do. Modern bombers with air refueling have planet-wide range already. Putting a B-whatever on a giant carrier serves no military purpose.

In theory you could have an increased sortie rate if bombers were based closer to the enemy. But for the same money as a bomber-capable carrier (and its escort fleet)you could buy enough more bombers and tankers to more than make up the difference.

Most of the operating cost of a carrier is the crew. Which dwarfs the capital cost of acquisition over its lifetime.

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C-130 carrier landings were tested a half century ago. Only minor modifications were done to the carrier or the aircraft. The C-130 could do unassisted landings and takeoffs with a 25,000 lb payload. (Article with video here, pic of the C-130 sitting neatly on the centerline here.)

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Do you duct tape wheels onto the roof, or do a barrel roll at the last minute? :wink:

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I’m not sure I buy this. From what you say, you have only inches to spare. I’m sure that your sims are quite accurate, but are you confident that they’re accurate to within literal inches?

Of course, it probably also depends on the exact windspeed. And the speed of the carrier itself, too, for that matter.

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Just touch down on the tail then the cockpit roof with the “crash override” feature engaged. The aircraft doesn’t break apart, it just slides to a stop intact. Your job is using ailerons & differential thrust to keep it going straight down the runway and wings level until it quits sliding. Landing perfectly straight is the real key here; correcting any sideways motion once sliding is seriously Yeagertastic.

Not a real-world plausible outcome, but we’re just messin’ around. As with normal ops, we’re just trying to control the machine to accomplish a certain goal, be that silly or sensible.

No different than shooting trick shots in pool; the sink-six-balls-in-six-holes-with-one-shot trick has no use in real world play either. But it’s still fun to try to pull off.

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To be sure we only know for sure we can play this video game, not necessarily the real thing. There’s artificiality in the unrealistically uniform wind, smooth seas, the uniform braking friction on the deck, etc. We can’t know exactly how close we came to touching down in the first few feet, nor exactly how far over the end we stop. We know the gear stayed on deck at both ends and the bow had completely disappeared from view out our “windows”.

The IP staff has played with this stuff enough to know how far to crank the headwind up to make the game playable. At 100 knots headwind it’s be fairly easy to get stopped in the distance available. At 30 knots it’d be flat impossible. Somewhere in the middle is where the game can be played and both won and lost with players around our skill level. Which is where he set the wind.

Had we kept playing a few more rounds I doubt I’d have succeeded over 2/3rds of the time, and maybe not done that good.

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Back in 1982 I had the sheer joy of visiting my uncle who worked on the simulators for a Truly Wonderful Airline that is no longer in operation. He checked out one for service and let us kids have at it. Best video game ever.

And yes, we tried flying sideways between the gap of the WTC towers and all other manner of improper use. The graphics were certainly primitive by current standards and night scenes were much more realistic than day.

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The simulator doesn’t have the ability to replay and view from an external camera? Really?

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I’m guessing not - and with 11X the gross weight of an A-4 slamming down, I wonder how the carrier deck itself would do.

Part of the testing during Navy fighter aircraft development involves dropping the airframe from perhaps ten feet to see how the whole thing behaves.

F-14 drop test

F-18 drop test

Occasionally they slam down that hard on the carrier deck, if they happen to be descending rapidly just as the deck is pitching upward.

Commercial passenger aircraft get something similar (e.g. A-380 gear drop test), but not from nearly as high up.

To be fair, the 767 isn’t as hefty as the A-380. But I wonder about the impact forces on the carrier deck from a 250,000-pound 767 slamming down at the limit of its strength, compared to something like a 40,000-pound superhornet slamming down at the limit of its strength.

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LSL - So a 50 knot head wind was dialed in. Was the carrier also moving full speed ahead?

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Fascinating thread - thanks!

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I’ll bet any pilot could land an Airbus A380 on an aircraft carrier.

Once.