Computer System Designed to Manage Aircraft Carrier Deck Traffic

G__ help them if it is Windows based....

No kidding. First the software crashes. Then the computer crashes (entirely). Then the entire wing crashes.

Meatballs, FSO's, and the Air Boss are good insurance.

I had a pilot tell me about a story of a carrier landing where the aircraft pancaked into the rear of the carrier.

The XO sent in the fire brigade to clean up the mess and a few minutes later the XO got a phone call.

It was the pilot! He was calling to find out where he was.

The nose of the aircraft had broken off and skidded into some dark room in the aft of the carrier and the pilot was disoriented from the crash, but ambulatory enough to find a phone and call the tower.

I am sure that he was demoted to flying a desk from that point onward, but he lived!

That particular landing was called a "Fantail Strike" when my Father-in-law was aboard the USS Midway, and the USS Bon Homme Richard. As a Senior Chief Avionics Tech (ATCS), his birthing spaces were under the after section of the flight deck, where they were able to look out an aft facing porthole and see the planes on short final. He said they had one fantail strike during his tour, fortunately when no one was in the spaces, because they were on station off Nam, and at GQ at the time, in which the plane blew flaming fuel into that space and fried everything flammable in it.

Scary life, that of the carrier airedale.