Carrier Operations Part 3

During WWI, the Royal Navy had worked out the basic mechanics of operating airplanes from ships, but the absorption of its aviation units into the Royal Air Force in 1918 saw British naval aviation stagnate in the years after the war. Progress would instead come from the United States, which commissioned its first carrier, Langley, in 1922. Langley had been built as collier Jupiter, and was converted as simply as possible, with a deck built over the existing ship and the coal holds converted to carry aviation supplies, except the one that had machinery for the single lift. There was no hangar as such, with planes being stored under the open-sided flight deck on what had been the upper deck of Jupiter. Moving them about was the work of a pair of overhead cranes, which meant that early operations, where each plane had to be struck down before the next could land, were even slower than aboard Argus.

Langley, known as the "Covered Wagon"

This was clearly unacceptable for an operational carrier, and Langley might have been simply an experiment if not for Joseph Reeves. Reeves was a career surface officer, and had been Jupiter's first captain, but became interested in aviation as it started to demonstrate its potential in the 20s. The Billy Mitchell-driven imbroglio over military aviation a few years earlier had seen Congress require that all aviation units be commanded by aviators, which was also a problem for the Navy, as virtually none of its pilots had the rank to fill senior posts. The solution was the naval aviation observer's course, set up to teach senior officers about flying and qualify them under the law, even if they were not rated to actually fly planes. Reeves passed in 1925, and became Commander, Aircraft Squadron, Battle Fleet, the senior aviation officer afloat. As an outsider who had just completed a stint at the Naval War College, Reeves began his tenure with a lecture. "First of all, from what I have seen, this command lacks a coordinated set of tactics and has no conception of the capabilities and limitations of the air force" was not a sentence designed to endear him to his pilots, but he swiftly laid out a number of questions about how best to turn a ship and a group of planes into an effective part of the fleet, and set about answering them.

Reeves (left) and William Moffett aboard Langley

Some of this involved tactical development, but Reeves realized that the number of planes he could get into the air was as important as the tactics they would use, and set about a systematic study of how to operate more planes from Langley. For landing, he ditched the restraining gear and fitted side-to-side arrestor wires that would be caught by a tailhook on the plane. These served to stop the plane in a specific place, and keep it steady until a handling party arrived, and unlike Ely's system, they used friction drums instead of sandbags, making them relatively quick to reset. Taking advantage of this would require better flight deck crews, and Reeves and Langley's XO, John Towers, set up a system of specialized flight-deck crews, each with a single job, and color-coded to help make sense of the busy flight deck.¹ A plane coming aboard would be freed from the arresting gear by a green-shirted hook-man, then moved forward by the blue-clad handlers under the direction of a "yellow-shirt" plane director. The fueling party, wearing purple, and brown-clad mechanics would prep it for the next flight, while a white-shirted engineer would check their work. This system was so successful that it remains in use today.

A plane lands aboard Saratoga while another taxis forward into the park thanks to the barrier

But this system still left Reeves with a serious problem. Ranging planes aft meant that takeoff intervals could fall below 10 seconds, aided by the practice of turning off to starboard to reduce the interference of wake turbulence on following planes, but landing was still slow, as the plane had to be struck down on the elevator, then craned off onto the "working deck", and the whole procedure would have to be repeated in reverse when it was time to launch. It would be much better if planes could simply stay on deck the whole time. Parking them forward after landing would work, but only as long as all of the planes successfully snagged an arrestor wire, and the hooks weren't reliable enough to count on that. The solution was a wire-rope barrier stretched across the deck forward of the wires to catch any wayward planes. If the plane made a successful "trap", the barrier dropped and the pilot would taxi forward of it before shutting down the engine, cutting the landing cycle from 3.5 minutes to 90 seconds or less. If the plane didn't trap, the barrier would generally mess up the prop and do a bit of damage to the plane, but this was seen as acceptable given the greatly reduced cycle time.

Langley's working deck

This practice also allowed the carrier to carry more aircraft than could fit in the hangar, and from this point onward, operational planes would essentially live on the flight deck of American carriers. This was in notable contrast to British practice, which had been shaped by the more fragile aircraft of a decade earlier,² and would greatly shape the way the two navies thought about their airplanes in the interwar years.

A dense deck park aboard Courageous, made possible by brakes

Two other innovations took place in the late 20s that greatly improved carrier operations, one technical and one operational. The technical innovation was the installation of brakes on aircraft, which gave the pilot the ability to hold his airplane in position on deck without the use of chocks and to maneuver on his own. When combined with a swiveling tailwheel, it also meant that instead of having to range all of the airplanes on the centerline, they could be staggered, greatly increasing the number of planes that could be launched at once. More than that, the brakes allowed the pilot to run the engine up to full power before starting the takeoff roll, which increased acceleration and allowed the first plane to be spotted slightly further forward, increasing range capacity even more. The advent of brakes also allowed the British to discard their retaining gear, although it would take until the mid-30s for arresting gear to become standard on their carriers.

An LSO guides a plane into land aboard Lexington

The operational innovation was the "batsman", or landing signal officer (LSO), whose job was to help pilots align themselves with the deck and land more consistently. The batsman would stand near the aft edge of the deck, wearing a brightly colored jumpsuit and carrying a pair of paddles. If the pilot was above the ideal glideslope, the LSO would raise his arms in a "V", or lower them into an inverted V if the plane was low. The result was more pilots catching the ideal wire, easing the work of the hook party, and fewer going into the barrier and making a mess. This was another American innovation copied by the British a decade later, after the RN regained full control over shipboard aircraft in the mid-30s. The two navies used different systems, as the American LSO was an advisor to the pilot, while the British Deck Landing Control Officer (DLCO) was the person with primary responsibility for the landing, able to give mandatory orders to the guy in the air, but the basic principle was pretty much the same. The DLCO was supported by two enlisted men, one of whom was responsible for passing information about things like the plane having its hook down and what wire it caught, and the other making notes for debriefing the pilots afterwards.

So by 1930, many of the critical elements of carrier operation had been developed: arresting wires, keeping planes on deck, carefully-trained crews and someone to assist with landing. Things slowed down through the 30s, before the press of war turbocharged operational development, a subject we will look at next time.