How To Land And Take Off From An Aircraft Carrier In A Boeing 737-400

By Alan McPherson

While purpose built aircraft with their arrester hooks, and ships with steam powered launchers, carry out their functions without too much fanfare, how much more skill would be needed to do the same thing with an airliner? Weighing in at 60 tons, with no arrester hook, touching down at 100 knots, and having to come to a screeching halt before reaching the wet end of the shortest military runway in existence! Can it be done? Yes it can! And I'll show you how.

Go straight to "select flight," and choose "Carrier Approach". Use the "slew function" to gain the necessary height and distance from the Carrier to give you time to change the following settings.

• Change from the Cessna to the 737-400.
• Choose the "Spot View" viewed from directly behind.
• Change the View Distance to 300 feet.
• Hit shift plus z to provide the height and speed information you will need. (Wheels down, 30 knot wind, and full flaps are already set).
• Arm the spoilers.
• Set the rudder to auto-coordination.
• Position the aircraft at about 100 feet height, at approximately 110 knots, on a favorable approach to the carrier.

Now having gone to all this trouble, save this situation for future use, go to "save flight," and tick the "make this the default flight" box, because there's one thing that's certain, you are going to need a lot of practice!

At this stage, don't forget to make a recording of each attempt. You can delete the failures, but when you succeed, you sure will want to save it to replay to your friends!

Now for the landing.

Try to land clean and positive, at the very beginning of the flight deck, at the slowest possible speed, (about 100 knots) and without bouncing, as you need the wheels on the deck for the wheel brakes and reverse thrusters to operate. One good bounce can hurl the plane the full length of the deck! At touch down, immediately throttle off. [F1] and activate the reverse thrusters [F2] and apply the brakes. For this exercise, let's be optimistic and assume you managed to stop it in time. Now leave the reverse thrusters operating and by this means back the aircraft the full length of the deck, all the way to the stern. It's not easy to do, as it whips around like backing a car, but you can go forward to try again.

Now for the take off.

• Set the flaps to the 4th notch.
• Retract the spoilers.
• Lock the brakes on.
• Apply full throttle, (not just take off power, as we need all the thrust we can get).
• When fully spooled up, release the brakes.

By the time the plane has reached the other end of the runway, the aircraft will have barely reached flying speed. It's doing about 90 knots, it will "ski jump" off the deck and sink alarmingly towards the sea. At this stage, (with a bit of luck), it usually gains just enough speed here to miss hitting the water and climb away. Phew! Mission accomplished! Turn off the recorder.

An easy way to gain success quickly is to start practicing into a higher wind speed, say 80 knots. This makes meeting the challenge much easier, and as you succeed with this wind speed, reduce it slowly, until you can do the same at 30 knots. At these higher wind speeds reverse thrusting is not necessary as the wind alone blows the plane back to the stern. 747's can be flown in the above scenario but their minimum target wind speed is somewhat higher than the 30 knots of the 737.

Alan McPherson
alanm@paradise.net.nz