Carrier Operations

Every Marine aviator is carrier qualified. Operating from aircraft carriers requires precision in order to ensure safe launches and recoveries.

LANDING PRACTICE INTRO:

You love your Corsair in a dogfight, but the landings can often be far scarier than tangling with an ace Zero pilot!

Although we usually fly off larger carriers, we practice on this little guy in order to make the real landings during our squad meets seem like a cake walk.

A word about authenticity: the goal here is to fly with the cockpit ON. Having it off negates the need for an authentic curved approach.

By all means use the external view to see if your flaps, gear and hook are down, but don't use the external view during the actual landing.

Setup for Landing:

In this mission, you're on the final downwind leg. Your height is 100 metres and your speed is 220 kmh. You need to do the following to get setup before your final port turn into the carrier:

1. Request landing from the LSO.
2. Open your cowl flaps.
3. Reduce speed to 180 kmh.
4. Flaps to "take off" or "landing" (your preference).
5. Lower your gear.
6. Lower your hook.

When to Turn:

Look to your left and visually acquire the carrier. When your port wingtip is perpendicular to the stern of the boat, give a slow count to three and then start your port turn for your final approach.

Bleed Some Speed:

During the turn, you'll bleed speed, but that's okay: you want to keep your final approach speed to about 140 - 150 kmh.

Altitude and Attitude:

As for altitude…drop a bit but maintain your height just above the level of the carrier deck. Attitude is preferably at 15-degrees above the horizon.

The Curved Approach is Best:

You want to stay in the banked turn as you come into the carrier as long as possible so you can keep the deck in sight up until the last moment when you'll straighten out and cut power for the final drop…and yes, you will have to drop somewhat to make a decent landing. If you come in nice and level like you do on a ground strip, you may not catch a wire. If this weren't already complicated enough, try to flare as you touch down to ensure you catch a wire.

Straight Approach --- BAD:

If you find yourself coming out of the turn to line up and you're too far behind the carrier, you'll have to do a "straightaway" catch up. Might as well go around as you'll won't be able to see the deck anyway.

Which Wire?

A good landing is a 3-wire catch. A 1- or 2-wire catch means you were dangerously low. Besides, trying to do a 1-wire catch (for bragging rights, of course) more often than not results in stalling your port wing and going into a torque stall where you'll roll uncontrollably into the water or crash spectacularly into the stern of the boat. Better to be too hot and/or high and do a "bolter" and fly around again for another try.

Whew!

Upon landing, insert your chocks and lift your hook. Then remove your chocks, taxi to the side and fold your wings. Now get yourself a beer—you deserve it!

Downloadable Carrier Landing Practice Mission

This practice mission is on the USS Kitkun Bay CVE (short carrier) because I figure that if you can master landing on it, landing on the big carriers we use in our online missions will be a piece o' cake.

Here's the file: VMF-124 Landing Practice Mission (4 KB)

Unzip it and place the .mis and .properties files in your Missions\Single\UN\F4U-1D folder.

To play, go to Single Missions and select USN as the Air Force and F4U-1D as the aircraft type. You'll see the title "VMF-124 Landing Practice 1". There's a little write up in the full description if you like book lurnin', otherwise just hit "Fly".

Grading Landings (this section is still in developement):

You have three options for getting your carrier qualifications verified:

1. Do your quals during an online multiplayer session
2. Do your quals offline and post your log file
3. Do your quals and record a track file.

If we were to use track files to "judge" a pilot candidate's carrier landing quals, the LSO would use the track file to grade a variety of items about each landing.

If you want to know how current fighter pilot carrier landings are graded, Neddie Seagoon was kind enough to point out this page explaining carrier landing grading written by a real LSO.