Floaty Friday
We’ll start with a piece of good news. Darn near lost us a perfectly good handcar airplane back in November 2023. The plane in the scenario is an F/A-18E Super Hornet on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
On November 27, the pilot was coming in for a routine landing when one of the arresting wires used to rapidly slow the planes down on the flight deck “suffered a catastrophic failure” that caused it to snap after the fighter jet hooked onto it.
Before the wire failure, the arresting gear slowed the pilot’s plane down from a landing speed of 136 knots to 80 knots, according to one of the documents. It said that the pilot “executed procedures consistent with carrier landings by advancing his throttles to military power upon touchdown.”
The pilot immediately sensed something was wrong. After the aircraft reached its minimum speed, he immediately pushed the throttles to maximum afterburner to gain as much thrust as possible. The jet rolled off the end of the carrier’s angle deck at a dangerously low speed of 88 knots. A fighter jet normally clears the deck at around 150 knots. AOL
According to Navy-type authors like Stephen Coonts, someone yells AH SHIT Bolter about then. No matter what, kicking in the afterburners probably saved his butt (not to mention about $60,000,000 of Boeing’s finest) as the plane got to within 16 feet of the water before getting enough smash to pull up. FYI, on a Super Hornet that is the height of the tail. No word on whether seat reupholstery was needed – had I been there it would have.
The USS Gerald R. Ford. (Breaking Defense)
Moving on to the Gerald Ford… the Ford is the only ship equipped with a Dual Band Radar. It operates in both X and S bands simultaneously, and permits remarkably long-distance target tracking and identification – when it works.
The specific version of the SPY-6 destined to supplant the DBR on Ford is a subvariant of what is also known as the Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR) and will include three separate fixed antenna arrays installed around the carrier’s island instead of the DBR’s six arrays. All subsequent Ford class carriers will be built with EASR, leaving just Ford as the only carrier to ever have fielded the DBR.
TWZ has previously unpacked the capabilities of the complete SPY-6 family, which currently includes four different variants, and the potential payoffs of fielding such an advanced and scalable active electronically scanned array radar system across the fleet. In addition to Ford class carriers, the Navy plans to install versions of the radar onto various new surface combatants, carriers and amphibious ships going forward, and plans are underway to back-fit it into existing destroyers as well.
So this is a one-off system. How many spares do you need to buy for the life-span of the system? What about technical support? Put it like this – simply changing to the EAQSR for the next Ford-class ship is estimated to save $120,000,000.
“DBR availability declined during the FY23 [composite training unit exercise] with the continuous demand for radar coverage and an intermittent failure observed during operations,” the report states. Service officials did not respond to TWZ questions on the report’s findings by deadline, and this article will be updated when those answers come in. Prior DOT&E reports have blamed subpar DBR performance on “the operational expectation of continuous radar coverage.” The War Zone
So the radar is as flaky as the heavy-lift elevator system, which is also not working at 100%. THAT’s encouraging.
Let’s close with the commander of the USS Gettysburg. Might recall that in December his ship shot down one of our own F/A-18s during a Houthi missile attack last year. Tres uncool, dude. Well, Elvis has left the building and Captain Justin Hodges has left the ship after an unusual at-sea change of command January 30. The Navy said this was a routine CoC, but no word on any end-of-tour bling or where he is headed. One suspects the line from AW1Ed’s favorite movie, “flying rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong” may be somewhat applicable. Military.com
Category: Navy, Science and Technology
“Before the wire failure, the arresting gear slowed the pilot’s plane down from a landing speed of 136 knots to 80 knots”
Must have been a knot in the wire.
I’m sure the Gettysburg had quite the routine change of Command at Sea! I’ll bet they even “Piped” him off as he exited the plank…at sea!
I was never inclined to seve in the Navy but love hearing your stories about Navy stuff.
Re: the arresting cable snap.
Here’s a PLAT camera video of it happening on the Ike in 2016 with a Hawkeye.
As dramatic as it is with the aircraft, it’s even more dramatic on the deck…sometimes fatally dramatic.
That cable is about 2 inch thick stranded steel wire. It is HEAVY and when it snaps, it whips around its anchor point faster than the eye can follow and with tremendous force. If it hits you it will at a minimum break your bones.
Shortly after I made Chief, I was scheduled to go out on a short training cruise on the GW to do “Carrier Quals” off the coast of Virginia. As a fairly newly minted CPO I was going out to play flight deck coordinator for the squadron.
I don’t even remember exactly why now (it wasn’t at my request, I do know that), but a week before the deployment I was swapped out with another CPO…Chief “Mac” McNeil…who went instead and I stayed home.
While on that cruise, they experienced an arresting cable failure. In this one, the F/A-18 wasn’t able to recover and was lost, but the Pilot ejected safely.
Eight sailors were injured; the most severely was Mac. The cable hit him in the head. He saw it coming and raised his arms to defend himself, and that may have saved his life, but both forearms were badly broken as well.
He survived but suffered permanent Traumatic Brain Injury and was medically retired after a couple of years of recovery and physical therapy.
Mac is a good man and was a good Chief and shipmate. Seeing him in the hospital that way and knowing it could have (should have?) been me was a very humbling experience.