New Carrier Landing Tech Wows Pilots on First Deployment08 May 2017 Hope Hodge Seck"ABOARD THE USS GEORGE H. W. BUSH, PERSIAN GULF — After eight hours in the cockpit executing airstrikes on ISIS targets, fighter pilots assigned to this carrier are getting a little extra help as they come in for a landing.... ...How much more precise? So much, pilots attached to the ship told Military.com, that it’s causing their arresting cables to wear unevenly....
...With
PLM [Precision Landing Mode formerly MAGIC CARPET] flight control logic, the descending F/A-18 Hornet or E/A-18 Growler will use its flaps to help control rate of descent, allowing for a more consistent throttle speed and fewer manual corrections.
On the Bush, a Nimitz-class carrier, pilots have 786 feet of flight deck to work with, less than a tenth of a traditional runway length. But the requirements of landing are far more precise; pilots told Military.com they needed to fly the nose of the aircraft through a an imaginary box about one foot across in order to properly align their descent and snag a landing cable.
On a dark night, Hornet pilots have described the experience of executing such a landing on a carrier as “emotional.” [whilst they are hypoxic - cool]
One pilot assigned to the wing’s Strike Fighter Squadron 87, the Golden Warriors, which flies the F/A-18E Super Hornet, said the use of the new technology had caused accuracy rates to skyrocket — so much so that the target arresting cable, usually the second of three on the Bush, was wearing out faster than the others and had to be rotated. “We were statistically too accurate,” said “JoJo,” the training officer for VFA-87, who asked to be identified by his callsign....
...The system is currently planned for a 2019 full roll-out to Super Hornet and Growler squadrons across the Navy. McCall said the only element the current system lacked was full redundancy as a fail-safe.
“Because it doesn’t have full redundancy, we still expect our youngest aviators to come out of our training pipeline and learn how to fly the jet manually, so they have a baseline to fall back on in case of some sort of aircraft malfunction,” he said. “I do expect those requirements to change as the system is fully redundant.”
PLM doesn’t guarantee a perfect landing or take the pilot out of the game, however. During observation of daytime carrier landings May 3 and 4, Military.com saw at least one bolter, when an aircraft fails to snag an arresting hook, and multiple wave-offs, in which planes weren’t correctly aligned in their approach and were told to circle and try again.
Nor does it take the fun out of flying, JoJo said. Only one pilot in the entire air wing didn’t love the system, he said, and that pilot did not have much experience on it. Nostalgia for the old way of landing was essentially nonexistent, he said...."
Source: https://www.defensetech.org/2017/05/08/ ... ws-pilots/