The workload on the flight deck of today’s aircraft carrier has evolved from the jobs and requirements of the fast attack carriers of World War Two. Aircraft, equipment, and technologies have certainly changed over the years, but the fundamental role of bringing an Air Wing, its personnel and aircraft, to wherever it is needed in the world, and operating naval aviation there, is still the priority.
Shirt colour differentiation is how to tell who does which jobs on the flight deck of a modern U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. In today’s U.S. Navy, the men—and increasingly, the women—are identifiable by the jerseys they wear. On the American carriers the tractor drivers, aeroplane handlers, aircraft elevator operators, and the phone talkers and messengers wear blue jerseys. Brown shirts are for Air Wing plane captains and leading Petty Officers, while the Air Wing maintenance people, catapult and arresting gear crews, quality assurance personnel, cargo handlers, hook-runners, ground support equipment trouble-shooters, helicopter landing signal enlisted personnel, and ship’s photographers all wear Green. Purple is the shade worn by aviation fuel personnel; and ordnance, crash, salvage, and explosive ordnance personnel all wear Red. Squadron plane inspectors, landing signal officers, air transfer officers, liquid oxygen crews, safety observers, and medical personnel all wear White. Yellow jerseys denote aircraft handling officers, plane directors, and catapult and arresting gear officers.
British Royal Navy flight deck personnel on its active modern carriers wore a coloured vest known as a surcoat which, as with the their American navy counterparts, identified them by function. In the RN, Flight Deck Officers, the Chief of the Flight Deck, and aircraft directors wore Yellow surcoats, while Blue surcoats were reserved for naval airmen and photographers. Brown surcoats denoted aircraft and engine full supervisory ratings, and Air electrical full supervisory ratings wore Green. Air radio full supervisory ratings wore Green with a Blue stripe. Red surcoats were the identifier of the crash and salvage parties. Weapon supply/all ratings wore Red with a Black Stripe. Flight deck assault guides wore Red with a White stripe. Medical attendants wore White with a Red cross. Deck supervisors, duty aircrew, watch chiefs, and Air Engineering Officers wore White. Flight deck engineers wore White with a Black stripe, and aircraft engine mechanics wore Grey.
Preparation for flight operations aboard an aircraft carrier of the U.S. Navy actually begin the day before the ops are scheduled. In the evening before, an Air Plan is prepared outlining the entire scheduled activity of the operation. The plan is distributed the night before and includes all information required for all concerned. It includes the information about the mission itself: the number of sorties to be flown, the fuel and ordnance load requirements, and the tactical communication frequencies to be used, as well as the launch and recovery times. The flight quarters are announced and manned. No crew members who are not directly involved in flight operations are allowed to be on the flight deck or in the deck-edge catwalks.
The briefing for the pilots and aircrew is given on the specifics of their mission and the sequence of events planned. They are due at their aircraft thirty to forty-five minutes before they are scheduled to launch, giving them ample time to complete a thorough pre-flight inspection of their aircraft before the order to start engines.
While all the above is going on, the various flight deck personnel are readying their gear and equipment for the upcoming op. Well before any aircraft engines are started, the ritual foreign object damage (FOD) walk-down is conducted in which all off-duty personnel, mainly Air Wing and flight deck, participate. Normally, the walk-down is sponsored by one of the Air Wing squadrons and lively music is provided for their motivation. With the gamut of aircraft maintenance and repair occurring on the flight deck, it is virtually inevitable that small items such as rivets, bits of safety wire, and small tools hit the deck during such activity and are not noticed at the time. Later, when the aircraft engines are running, such objects can be blown around and cause potential injury to people and damage to engines. Tiny objects can sometimes be found hidden in the recessed ‘pad-eye’ aircraft tie-down points that are spotted all over the flight deck. Just ahead of the walk-down force, personnel manning air hoses proceed to blow any collected debris or water from the pad-eyes, before the deck-wide line of FOD-walkers slowly make their way down the entire length of the flight deck, retrieving all objects that may pose even the slightest threat to man and machine. In their wake, stroll a group of personnel pushing scrubber vacuums to remove anything that may have been overlooked by the FOD-walkers. Carrier operations experience has shown foreign object damage to be a deadly menace to personnel, aircraft, and equipment, so the FOD-walk procedure is a serious, no-nonsense preliminary of every carrier flight operation. The start-engines order is never given until the FOD-walk has been completed.
Catching a few minutes of much needed rest; below: The Air Boss directing all flight operations aboard the USS Coral Sea in the 1970s.
Rotary aircraft are the first machines scheduled to start up and launch in a flight operation; they are the plane guard helicopters which depart to orbit the ship in a D-shaped pattern, so as to be in position to quickly rescue an airman or aircrew member in an emergency situation.
top: Deck crew aboard a Royal Navy carrier in the 1940s; below: Second World War U.S. Navy aviators preparing for a mission; bottom: Helicopter operations on the carrier HMS Illustrious in the late 1990s; above: The SB2C Curtiss Helldiver.
When the fixed-wing aircraft scheduled to fly the mission are ready to launch, the giant Nimitz-class supercarrier is turned into the wind to pick up the normally required thirty-knots of wind over the flight deck for take-offs. It is then that the yellow-shirted plane directors guide the first aircraft to be launched to precise positions on the two forward steam catapults. As soon as the planes are spotted on those positions, large jet blast deflectors rise from the deck just behind the planes, to protect flight deck personnel just aft of the catapults. Now it’s the job of the hook-up greenshirts, who crouch at the nose wheels of the aircraft on cats one and two and attach the nose gear to the catapult shuttle with nose-tow and hold-back bars. Another greenshirt then moves in to the right of one plane’s canopy and holds up a black box with illuminated numerals flashing the predicted weight of the aircraft. The pilot must then concur that the figure is correct. That done, the cat launch personnel calibrate the power of the cat to the requirement of the plane about to launch. Low clouds of steam billow down the length of the cat as a yellowshirt signals the pilot, who releases the brakes and applies full power. The cat officer signals with a rotating hand,, two fingers extended, as the pilot does a quick final check that the aircraft and controls are functioning correctly. He then salutes to indicate that he is ready to launch, and braces himself. If he is flying an F/A-18 Hornet, U.S. Navy procedure requires him to place his right or stick hand on the canopy frame grab-handle and keep it there for the duration of the cat shot.
above and below: HMS Illustrious at sea; bottom: An EA-1F Spad Skyraider with jammers on the outboard wing stations and a radar pod on the inboard right wing, departs the USS Constellation.
At this point, the catapult officer checks the final readiness of the cat and receives confirmation from other flight deck personnel that the aircraft is ready for flight. He then signals the shooter in the enclosed launch station bubble (by touching the deck) to press the cat firing button. Launch … and the four G force of the steam cat hurls the aeroplane from the flight deck. The plane reaches 150 knots air speed from a standing start in two seconds, sending the flesh and facial muscles of the pilot racing towards the back of his or her skull.
With the departure of the first two mission aircraft, the catapult crews hurry to position and attach the next planes in the queue for launch. They can ready and launch an aircraft every thirty seconds if necessary. Frequently, they are required to set up and launch aircraft more than one-hundred times in a day. For the flight deck to run smoothly, an endless routine of planning, training, discipline, expert engineering, highly skilled maintenance, motivation, and nearly superhuman attention to detail is required. The primary concern overall is safety.
Airline pilot David Smith, when a naval aviator, accumulated more than 1,000 hours flying the Grumman F-14 Tomcat between 1982 and 1991. During that period, he made 342 carrier traps (landings) over the course of two Mediterranean cruises aboard the USS John F. Kennedy (CVA-67). After that, he instructed F-14 and F/A-18 pilots in adversary tactics at Key West, Florida, where all of the F/A-18 pilots who flew in the Gulf War Operation Desert Storm were trained. “We F-14 pilots flew whenever the ship had air operations. In a normal schedule, we flew during the day and every other night. Some of us flew every night, to make up for some of the weak night pilots and the senior squadron officers who just didn’t want to fly at night. Flying at night was not fun. Flying in the day was, and everyone wanted to do that.
above: Grumman TBF Avengers; below: A Fairey Firefly landing accident on a Royal Navy carrier.
top: A famous Royal Navy aviator of the Falklands War, Commander Nigel ‘Sharkey’ Ward; above: Captain Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, has flown more aircraft types than any pilot in history; below: Downtime finds these fliers enjoying a relaxing game in their carrier ready room..
“Most flight ops lasted either one hour and thirty minutes or one hour and forty-five minutes. In peacetime, the briefs started between one-and-a-half and two-hours before launch. The topics included such admin items as weather, aircraft, crews, join-up (rendezvous), lost communications, gas (inflight refueling amounts, altitudes and locations), and the mission briefing itself, which took longer and varied from ship support, to air-to-air basic fighter manoeuvring, to air intercept, to strafing, to section or division tactics. If operating near land, we might be supporting an overland operation or working with another country. The brief was where you transitioned from just being aboard the ship, to being reminded of why you were there. The actual brief was almost a formality because you had heard it all many times before, but it always served to make me focus on what I was about to do.
“If the brief ran long, you would walk immediately to Maintenance Control to check out the logbook on your airplane. You then signed for the airplane and went to the Paraloft, where flight equipment was stored. On the Kennedy it was a small room, no bigger than an average bedroom. With all of the hanging equipment, it could barely accommodate four persons. This was where you became an aviator. You went about the task of suiting up and preparing to go topside to do something that no one else on the planet was going to do at that moment.
“On the flight deck it was usually very quiet and rather peaceful at the beginning of a new ops cycle. Normally, it was a very dangerous place.
“The first task was to find your plane. There was never a clue as to where it would be spotted. You walked around the flight deck until you found the aircraft number you were looking for. People have been known to man the wrong airplane. Finding your airplane at night can be difficult and frustrating. When you found it, the plane captain (who might be just eighteen years old) would exchange a few words with you about the only thing you had in common: that airplane. I knew all my plane captains and all the maintenance personnel very well.
Pre-flighting an F-14 on board a carrier can be the most dangerous part of the mission. Some of them were parked with their tails hanging out over the edge of the ship. There could be twenty to thirty knots of wind over the deck, and trying to do a thorough pre-flight might put you in the safety nets, if not actually overboard. Walking around the plane you encountered chains that were trying to trip you, and many other little gotchas out to ruin your day.
“Climbing in and sitting in the seat of the Tomcat was a relief, a place of comfort. You knew your way around the cockpit with your eyes closed, and you felt safe. Because the F-14 burns gas fast, we always launched right after the E-2 Hawkeye (our eyes and ears) and the A-6 Intruder/tanker (our gas). A couple of F-14s would be spotted either on the catapults or just behind them. When the order was given, engines were started and we went through the various after-start checks.
“We had afterburners, but did not always need them for the cat shot. On deployment, when you are going to launch missiles and have a full load of fuel, you would always be using afterburners in the launch. You followed the plane director’s instructions and he would steer you into alignment just behind the catapult. He would then point to another plane director who was straddling the cat track about thirty feet ahead of your plane. He would slowly lead you forward until you were just behind the cat shuttle. Another director would guide you very precisely onto the shuttle and you would then be turned over to the CAT officer. When satisfied that your hook-up was correct, he would have the tension taken on your plane. Under tension, you would be required to go to full power. You did not come out of full power under any circumstances unless the CAT officer stepped in front of your plane and gave you the ‘throttle back’ signal. This was a trust that had been violated in the past, costing lives. Once under tension and in full power, you were going flying.
One of the many U.S. Navy escort carriers that played such a vital part in the Second World War, the USS Badoeng Strait, with Vought F4U Corsairs aboard.
“During the day you can see all of the actors on the stage. At night you see nothing but the yellow wands. Two totally different worlds. The difference is almost indescribable. “The plane is under tension and at full power and, when the CAT officer is content that all of the check-list items have been checked, he will give the signal to launch by touching the deck. Now the fun begins. F-14 pilots have long been accused of trying to be ‘cool’ by holding the head well forward during a launch, instead of of keeping it back against the headrest as most aviators do. Actually, when the launch bar releases, the airplane abruptly squats, it’s almost like hitting a pothole in the road. Your head is forced down and forward for a split second. This is quickly followed by an immediate and, hopefully, incredible acceleration forward. The neophyte who puts his or her head back against the headrest at the start of this sequence, will have it jolted forward—and then back—with amazing sharpness that will literally make him or her see stars.
Pioneering aviator Eugene Ely with one of the Curtiss Pusher aircraft he flew in early ‘aircraft carrier’ demonstrations.
“The intensity of the acceleration can vary, depending on the initial gross weight of the plane and the natural wind over the deck. You need a given end/air speed to go flying, and the heavier your plane is, the greater that air speed has to be. Less wind over the deck requires a harder, more powerful cat shot. At a maximum gross weight of 72,000 pounds, an F-14A, with little or no wind over the deck, requires a cat shot that will take the breath out of you. The acceleration is so rapid, it hurts. Such cat shots are not only hard on the pilot and the RIO [radar intercept officer in the back seat], they are hard on the plane as well. Generators, inertial navigation system alignments, radars … all are in jeopardy in such launches. Stories of instruments coming out and striking aircrew in the face and chest are not uncommon.
“On an extremely windy day, when the ship is barely moving, you may become concerned that your launch will not be hard enough to send you flying. That concern is directed towards the CAT officer, who may be about to shoot you into water breaking over the deck. He will try to time the launch with the ship’s pitches, but a cat shot into a severe down cycle will give you a windscreen full of ocean that you won’t soon forget. Still, when things work, and they most always do, the cat shot is the most enjoyable part of the cycle. Getting back on board is something else.”
When the flight deck is clear and no operations are scheduled, ship’s personnel are often permitted to exercise there and run laps around the immense 1,100-foot-long flight deck.
When the Royal Navy was operating Sea Harrier vertical take-off and landing jets from HMS Illustrious in the 1990s, Leading Aircraftman/Aircraft Handler Chris Hurst was aboard and involved in the flight operations activity: “Ten minutes prior to launch, we’d get a verbal communication from the flight control position to start the aircraft. Permission would then be given to the aircraft mechanics to liase with the pilots to start the engines and go through their various acceleration checks, making sure the wing flaps, etc, are at the right angles for launch, depending on the aircraft weights and weapon loads. The mechanics would also take off the outrigger ground locks and the lashings that are not required. Then they would be ready on deck.
“The aircraft directors would face towards the flying control position, watching for an amber light which meant that the ship was on a designated flying course and we had permission to taxi the aircraft onto the runway. The pilot would be told to ‘un-brakes.’ The two remaining nose lashings and the chocks would be removed. Then a Leading Aircraftman would guide the aircraft out of the range and pass it on to the Petty Officer of the Deck who was standing on the runway at the designated launch distance. He would then marshal it onto that launch distance, stop it on the brakes and pass the control of the aircraft launch to either the Captain of the flight deck, or the Flight Deck Officer, whichever was on watch at the time.
“The duty squadron Air Engineering Officer would then look round the aircraft and make sure everything was safe, all the relevent pins had been removed, etc. When he was satisfied, he would give a thumbs-up to the Flight Deck Officer, who would wait for a steady green light from Flyco, which meant he had the Captain’s permission to launch fixed-wing aircraft.
“Then, when he had checked up and down the runway that all was clear, he would raise a small green flag. The pilot would turn on a white nose wheel light and roar away up the deck and off the ski-ramp. As that aircraft was launched the next aircraft would be drawn out of the range and marshalled on in sequence, until all the aircraft had gone.
“All the time this was going on, there was a spare aircraft handling team ready in ‘the graveyard’ at the front of the deck, should anything go wrong. We called it the graveyard because it was for dead aircraft. They had a tractor ready to attach to the aircraft. Certain minor unserviceabilities could mean an aircraft not launching but having to taxi all the way up to the graveyard to get it out of the way, to clear the deck and make everything ready for the next aircraft to launch. There was nothing worse than an aircraft having a minor radio problem, sitting there with all its intake blanks missing. It was dangerous. Foreign object damage could occur with an aircraft zooming up the deck, so we preferred to get him straight to the graveyard and out of the way.”
top: The Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber approaching to land aboard this U.S. carrier; above: A wounded U.S. Navy gunner is helped from the turret of his TBF; below: A Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey vertical take-off and landing multi-mission aircraft which went operational in the U.S. Marine Corps in 2007.
Former U.S. Navy pilot Jack Kleiss: “The Enterprise flight deck was 109 feet abeam (including the island) and approximately 800 feet long. Usually less than half of that length was available for Scouting Six, because the TBDs of Torpedo Six and the SBDs of Bombing Six were always in the pack behind us. “We frequently watched a bomb-laden SBD drop out of sight as it took off and passed the bow of the ship. It then reappeared, picking up speed, getting a boost from the sixty-five-foot deck height and the ‘ground effect’ between wings and water.
“One day I was up on deck watching as a young pilot really almost touched the waves ahead of the ship. He later confided that he had taken off with his controls fully locked. Somehow he managed to remove the unlocking pin under the control stick, barely avoiding a crash into the sea. He must have been a contortionist.”
And another recollection from Kleiss: “One afternoon while Ensign Willie West and I were walking and talking to each other on the flight deck of the Enterprise, neither of us heard the centerline elevator warning signal—if it was sounded. Suddenly, Willie took a step into space, and I was right on the edge of the gaping hole.
“I expected to find him in a crumpled heap at the end of a thirty-foot drop. Instead, he walked away unhurt. He said that the elevator was moving downward almost as fast as he was falling, and that jumping on it was like landing on a feather bed.”
M. S. Cochran was assigned to the USS Enterprise in the Second World War: “We had just left Majuro anchorage. We were on our way to Hollandia. Due to strike there on 21 April. We were getting close to Hollandia, in an area where strict security required a darkened ship. AOM2/c Petty had left the fighter armory with AOM1/c F.S. Rice, heading towards the port bow. It was one of those nights when you literally could not see your hand in front of your face. Both men were cautious and felt somewhat safe because they thought the ‘safety chain’ was up across the bow. Neither realized that we had spotted two F4U night fighters at ‘ready’ on the catapults, with the pilots in them prepared for instant take-off. The safety chain was down.
“Petty was a step or two in front of Rice when suddenly Rice heard a muffled grunt. It didn’t take him long to realize that Petty had walked off the bow. Rice immediately ran aft to the LSO’s platform where he grabbed some float lights, and without thinking of the consequences, threw some of them overboard. What a sight to suddenly see lights behind the ship in that total darkness. Alert men on watch were quick to report. General Quarters was sounded and this particular GQ caught everyone at a time when ‘tense’ didn’t begin to describe how jumpy we were.
“The Officer of the Deck sounded ‘man overboard’ and every division met for immediate muster and roll call. Destroyers guarding the rear of the Task Force were given the OK to search for Petty. They directed their efforts to the float lights, but there was only one thing wrong with that. The length of flight deck that Rice had to travel to get to the LSO platform would take a fast runner forty to fifty seconds. The ship was moving at a fair rate of speed. In the time he took to run that distance, the closest light to Petty was judged to be a half mile away. The seas were also running choppy at four feet. The odds of finding Petty were in the needle-in-a-haystack category. We were thinking we would never see Petty again.
“However, there are survivors, some of which are extremely lucky, and some personally self-sufficient. Petty was both. The whale boats which the destroyers sent to look for him did an ever-expanding circle search out from the float lights. They had just decided to halt the search when they heard Petty whistle. He could not see them, but he heard their voices, so he managed to whistle with his fingers to his teeth. That is what saved him. He also helped himself by tying knots in his dungarees and filling them full of air as a float.
“We were back at Pearl in January 1944. Petty had gone on liberty and come back with tattoos of a rooster on one foot and a pig on the other. Old seamen’s lore has it that a sailor who does that will never drown. When we next returned to Pearl in July, we had sailors by the dozen getting tattooed with pigs and roosters on their insteps.”
above: This F/A-18 Hornet multi-role fighter survived a mid-air collision with another Hornet and returned safely to NAS Oceana, Virginia, in 1996. In the accident, the plane lost its radome, radar, canopy, an access door, and a centreline fuel tank. It also sustained foreign object damage to its starboard engine.