Simple Solutions - Aircraft Carriers

The aircraft carrier has been around since World War I. But there was a fundamental flaw in the designs, a flaw that was sometimes contributing the deaths of the airplane (and later jet) pilots.

To understand the flaw, you have to see how the system was supposed to work back then. You have your airplanes on the flight desk preparing to take off. But a squadron of other planes are coming in to land. So you have to wait for them to land first. When they land, there are a series of cables that stretch across the flight deck to grab the plane and stop it. There's only one runway on the flight deck, so what if a plane misses the cables?

USS Langley with single straight deck

That was the problem. The planes that were waiting to take off had to wait on the same runway that was letting planes land on it. If a landing plane missed the cables, then it would run head-on into the waiting planes.

After some time, it was decided to put up a net to catch the planes that missed the cables. That way, they could stop the runaway planes in time. The problem was that the planes sometimes missed the net and still crashed anyway.

Meanwhile, World War II came and went. If you want to look at the irony, you can see it plain as day. On one hand, we had planes landing and taking off from the same flight deck which meant a high risk of crashes and potential deaths. On the other hand, in the same amount of time, scientists were able to discover how to split the atom and even the beginnings of space exploration. We just couldn't figure out how to make the aircraft carrier safer.

It wasn't until the early 1950's when the idea finally was struck: have two runways! The most common versions of this can be seen on the Nimitz class carriers. The new feature has one runway for takeoffs which is straight, and then next to it is an angled runway that is 9 degrees off straight for landings. This allows takeoffs and landings to occur at the same time, so faster turnarounds in takeoff/landing. This also allows for safer landings. If a landing plane misses all the cables, then he simply revs the engines and takes back up, circling to land again.

USS Forestal with angled flight deck, launched in 1954

Yes, it took many years to come up with such a simple feature, but it has been an important safety feature of the aircraft carrier ever since.