Jump to content
Spartans Home

One of my dumber carrier errors


Zeno~SPARTA~
 Share

Recommended Posts

I have been practicing my carrier Take offs and landings under mission conditions. Today I started from a parking position on deck. I spent 10 minutes loading in JSOW coordinates then advanced to the catapult, lowered the launch bar, hooked up, max power and off I went. I thought I was closer to the water than usual on take off, but soon climbed. I am not very familiar with the JSOW so I focused on my instruments. Soon I was within range so I launched all 8 of them. On my instrument panel I noticed "Check Trim", I thought, weird, she's flying ok. I finally looked outside the cockpit and something caught my eye.

 

20220111100032_1.jpg

 

I had forgotten to unfold and lock my wings!! Somehow she flew anyway. I tried to unfold the wings in the air, but it must have been too much for the hydraulics, so I headed back to the carrier and tried to get a sense of the speed of the approach. Normally approach speed is between 150 and 170 knots, but she wouldn't stay in the air at those speeds so I approached the carrier at 200 knots, I remembered to lower the hook and managed to hit the carrier deck. But I thought I must have missed the wire since the plane was going over the edge. Just before I hit the throttle she stopped and rolled backwards a bit. I had caught the wire but my high speed stretched it more than normal.

 

20220111100927_1.jpg

 

This happened on the Stennis, it would not have happened on the super carrier since the crew signals you for every step of the launch process including unfold wings, they would not have let me take off in this state!

 

Checklists exist for a reason I guess.

 

 

 

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...