JonesyJPALS is supposed to be able to recover airplanes at up to sea state 4, in the freezing rain, at 2:00 AM, after a six hour sortie. Computers are wonderful things. 🙂
…and is observed, on every approach, by the goofers and a hundred plane manglers all suddenly religious and praying really hard!!! :diablo:
JonesyThey’re mainly meant for carrying & landing heavy equipment, not amphibious assault, & the dock & troop accommodation are sized accordingly, but more troops could be carried, although in less comfort.
I think this may be the key point to the rumours. The touted move to ‘strategic raiding’ as opposed to supported assault landings could, conceivably, bring a lesser requirement for afloat heavy forces. With F-35B, WAH-64 and developmental weapons systems like Fireshadow, perhaps Firescout or even Mantis the belief maybe that effects on target can be delivered without the need to put logistically demanding heavy sytems ashore.
With a lower requirement for deployed heavy forces two Bays could suddenly look readily sacrificeable. Insanity from top to bottom of course, but, hardly suprising if it turned out to be accurate!.
Jonesy…. but the F25b is not a helicopter, it has a much more dramatic take off involving very hight energy and temperature exhaust. Even if the multiple jet blast deflecters needed for each type could e fitted in the space, mixing three different types of cycle (helo, VSTOL and CATOBAR) on one deck would be, to put it mildy, problematic.
It is essentially still inserting a vertical landing cycle in a CATOBAR launch/recover programme. Yes you have more jet efflux in the -35B’s landing cycle, but, if its landing astern whilst cat shots happen off the bows its hardly of any consequence to the launch evolution. The VL could even be cleared in time for recovery of a failed cat launch on a go-round. Launch evolutions would depend on the bows configuration but could easily be complimentry with STOVL launches merged into catapult reset cycles.
Dont get me wrong I’m not advocating a mix of STOVL and CATOBAR I’m just saying that the flying programme incorporating the two techiques, while requiring coordination, is far from unworkable.
JonesyJFH…is that an acronym for Joint Force Hornet ? :diablo:
Nope….Joint Force Hopefully!!!:cool:
Much of your above post assumes no probs with F35b,I can assure you that vstol jets have their own particular structural problems…typically based around lack of heat dissipation and also harmonics.
Completely agree….this is all predicated on the fact that F-35B works. If it doesnt though we do, at least, have the option of switching technique having built large enough to accomodate CATOBAR kit. If F-35B fails choice is obviously taken out of the equation. I’d say then, with the CATOBAR costs largely fixed and unavoidable, thats when we could make savings opting for a cheaper airframe. If the airframe regeneration cycle times I’ve heard for Rafale are genuine (circa 8 man hours for routine turnaround!) I’d lean heavily in that direction personally.
One of the advantages/flexibilities of catobar is the ability to cross deck with allied navies,you have mentioned that the french do this with the USN,we would be able to do the same!!
With F-35B our pilots can land on anyones CATOBAR deck just fine. They just cant land on ours. The problem with this is where? :). Plus the Italian, Spanish and USMC F-35B lads can land on to their hearts content!!!.
We could discuss this for evermore,perhaps I will retire back to Historic and await the decisions 🙂
Indeed! 🙂
NoCuts
In addition how easy is it mix STOL with CATOBAR operations – I am asking as most proposed UAV and UVAC designs I have seen seem to be designed for CATOBAR operations and I wondered if it would cause serious problems for the RN
Anyone in the USN will tell you the same as Graeme has. Mixing STOVL and CATOBAR flight ops is inordinately complicated. Truth is its not. People have been mixing rotary and CATOBAR flight ops for decades without the plane manglers having breakdowns. If anything the efficiency of the carrier would be increased by the fact that a STOVL landing operation could occur simultaneous with a bows cat launch with no need for deck reconfiguration between cycles. The fact that there is no absolute need to put the carriers head into wind and burn on for 30knts to get wind-over-deck for STOVL launch ops is also a factor proving ease of flight ops with STOVL. Mixing CATOBAR and STOVL in the airgroup would show up some of the limitations of CATOBAR….which is why the USN are very intent on keeping the two seperate!!.
UAV ops will depend a lot on the type of UAV. If we are looking at a Mantis-type AEW/ISTAR platform these things will have 18-20hr on-station endurance times. One launch and recovery cycle a day is not going to be overly disruptive to anyones flying programme. A modest, 10-15000lb or so, hydraulic cat on the CVF waist ‘angle’ would likely be all required to get a Mantis-type drone off at MTOW. Doubtful that it would need arrestors for recovery either.
If you are looking at squadron strengths of proper CATOBAR strike UCAV’s though the equation changes a bit, but, there is still no fundamental issue with a CATOBAR/STOVL merge….other than cost of course where it is the worst possible combination obviously!!!.
JonesyHi Jonesy
Is this a fair representation of USN Carrier Quals ?
Doesnt seem too OTT to me ?Ours would not need to be any tougher !!CQ types and requirements
CQ is performed for new pilots and periodically for experienced pilots to gain/maintain carrier landing currency. CQ requirements (the number of landings / touch and goes required) are based on the experience of the pilot and the length of time since his last arrested landing[15]Undergraduate CQ for Student Naval Aviators, currently completed in the T-45 Goshawk and consisting of 14 day landings (10 arrested; up to 4 can be “touch and goes”).
Initial CQ flown in a newly designated aviator’s first fleet aircraft (FA-18, EA-6B, or E-2C), consisting of 12 day (minimum 10 arrested) and 8 night landings (minimum 6 arrested).
Transition CQ for experienced pilots transitioning from one type of aircraft to another, consisting of 12 day landings (minimum 10 arrested) and 6 night arrested landings.
Requalification CQ for experienced pilots that have not flown from the carrier within the previous six months, consisting of 6 day arrested landings and 4 night arrested landings.
rgds baz
Looks about right for the number of traps etc, but, it doesnt show the full detail of the process…all 4 landings couldnt be performed on the same night etc…its landing then appraisal then….next night…landing etc. They need to requalify more frequently than every 6 months though. My understanding, from an old aquaintance who once drove E-2’s, was that they requalified at the start of every deployment.
Its what I’ve been saying all along in our framework, going forward, applying US standards means waiting for light blue Super Hornet pilots to deck qualify before being able to operate from a CATOBAR CVF deck. That is a ridiculous handicap when STOVL pilots can fly on and take up ops immediately.
IF there was a big cost advantage with the Super Hornet to make it worthwhile I’d understand it. There isnt though as we’d need to disentangle ourselves from JFH and rebuild the Fleet Air Arm stovie support element. The RAF would be vexed with it as they’d lose 1 and 4sqdns without replacement and probably Wittering along with Cottesmore!. Our defence capability would be decreased as, current, joint role squadrons deployable ashore or at sea would be replaced with, pretty much, single-role sea-based forces.
Then we get to the costs of modifiying the ships, all the new shipboard training to handle and operate CATOBAR types and all the extra support costs involved. PLUS the shortened service lives of the fighters themselves with the cat/trap airframe cycle life limit.
IF we could afford to go CATOBAR and have a revitalised Fleet Air Arm I’d, in principle, have no problem with Super Hornet or Rafale or F-35C. STOVL does the job a lot more efficiently though and there is a lot more important stuff to spend the money on than catapults and arrestor cables.
Jonesyit sounds like that if the UK wanted to pay it could keep it’s shore based squadrons fully qualified on Cat and Trap operations without worrying if the QoE or PoW was available.
Not really!. Shore based ops and sims can teach the approach profile and the technique to accomplish the landing. Translating that to an approach and landing on a pitching deck charging along at 25knts is a huge fallacy when one mistake can easily be fatal. Add in even modestly intemperate weather and those operations increase in difficulty tenfold.
No-one goes into CATOBAR ops half-hearted….thats why the Aeronavale sends Rafale’s to operate with US CVN’s when the CdeG is in for mending.
Baz,
you are comparing apples to oranges…I never said that 1 deck landing would qualify the pilot,but the fact remains that the RAF pilots would be have doing their first ever deck landing without having ever had a dual training sortie in a hook equipped trainer….we did not have any hooked trainers
Sorry mate I didnt see this before!. They progressed from shore training to ship training and yes they would have made their first CATOBAR landing alone. That doesnt mean they were operational aboard the carrier when they climbed out of the cockpit after that first landing though. This is my point. The F-35B pilot IS operational, even if only in daylight at first, from the minute his plane is regenerated after the ferry flight to the carrier. The CATOBAR pilot still has the rest of his deck quals to progress through.
Pagen
As indeed they did, RAF Harrier GR.3 pilots on HMS Illustrious and Hermes with no prior experience, after 9 hr flights, and then having to go into combat – or has that wonderful British can do mind-set been banished all together now!
A feat made possible by the fact that the GR3 pilots didnt need to be CATOBAR rated to land on the carrier. If it was the old CATOBAR Ark Royal and the planes coming in were RAF F-4’s would non-CATOBAR trained RAF pilots have been able to land on the carriers and operate from them?.
JonesyIn times of extreme emergency – that requirement would be immediately waived…I dont know if you have ever been in the forces ,but all these ‘requirements’ are extremely flexible…and a reasonably experienced pilot would be expected to cope 😉
Yep I wore a dark blue uniform and I know lots of peacetime regs are waived in the name of generating a capability in time of emergency. I agree with what you are saying in that regard.
That doesnt go for a pilot to go straight into CATOBAR flight ops without the benefit of recent practice at it though. You can’t mess about with a process that, if it goes wrong, can wipe out flying operations completely for a period of hours!. Thats why Deck Quals regs exist and, in every service that lands on carriers ‘the hard way’ thats why each pilots every landing is critiqued and rated. CATOBAR is inherently inflexible like that because it is hard to do and is VERY bad news when anything in the chain goes wrong!.
A reasonably experienced pilot would, or should, refuse to deploy to a carrier if he hasn’t had sufficient work-ups to be deck qualified because of the risk he poses to his shipmates.
JonesyDoes that mean that CVF is unnecessarily large?
No, it means that 100 sorties isnt all THAT big a number and a full days flying programme can ramp up to that number very easily.
F/A-18
But what happened in the 60s when the RN had as many as four or even five carriers but at least one was in refit/reserve, what did the squadrons of the carrier not at sea do then?
We could afford to have dedicated Fleet Air Arm squadrons then though. Plus, as you detail, we had several decks to cycle them between. Of the two CVF’s we will, pretty much, only have one out at a time. Today we dont have enough aircraft to have a frontline squadron and an enlarged OCU/2nd line sqdn’s worth of aircraft sitting idle or doing circuits when we can have them actually on operations doing the job we bought them to do.
Baz
An RAF pilot landing (say) a buccaneer or Phantoom on a RN carrier would have been doing his first ever deck landing…we never had a dual control deck landing jet trainer….!!!!
…but his first ever deck landing would not deck qualify him. It would be the first landing as part of his deck qualification process….after a fair period of shore instruction and shore based training. He would go on to several weeks of further training to get his deck rating before he could be declared operational. The F-35B pilot could deck qualify after a landing-on from the ferry flight and a short ‘duskers’ hop….if the ferry flight arrives after daylight hours you could even scrub the duskers check flight!. Thats the difference.
TooCool
the F-35 is controlled differently, flies differently and has completely different performance than the harrier, which means that the pilots transitionning to it would have to go through a complete training program, not necessarily much cheaper or faster than the CATOBAR qualifying…
As NoCuts states I’m not saying there is no need for conversion training to F35B. I am saying that there is no need for an F35B pilot straight from a 3 month det ashore on the Falklands (wild example) to undergo any additional training to go and operate from a 65k ton carrier. A CATOBAR pilot after 3 months shore based would have to requalify before going operational.
JonesyBut do you need a 70,000 ton carrier for that? Seems like a ship half the size or less would do.
Yes you need a 65,000 ton carrier if you want to do the 100-sortie-per-day part. If you dont want that then a smaller vessel will suffice. The Carrier Strike requirement stipulates the sortie rate so thats what we get.
Plus, remember, the ship is intended to be reconfigurable to CATOBAR in event F-35B folds or the global threat situation changes some years down the track. Bit hard to reconfigure a 30,000ton CVS to do CATOBAR at meaningful sortie rates.
JonesyI was replying to earlier posts :)you cannot just read/comment on one of my posts and ignore previous posters 🙂
Our pilots are amongst the best in the world,some people seem to think they would struggle !!
I reckon catobar ops would be cheaper overall,and that catobar a/c are much more capable/flexible,so we would appear to be in broad agreement 🙂
Baz,
Again mate you are looking no further than an individual aircrafts’ performance and thinking that is the extent of the capability. It is a wholly inaccurate assessment of what this is about.
If we want to have Fleet Carriers and police the worlds oceans then what you, and so many others here, are advocating is right. We would need CATOBAR, we’d need Hawkeye and wholly dedicated Fleet Air Arm airframes and pilots to operate them. If we had a requirement to perform that kind of operation we would have to have the defence budget commensurate with it.
We dont have that defence budget though. We have more pressing requirements of the defence budget we do have than to perform sea control over wide and uncontested tracts of ocean – which is what you all seem so intent on setting us up for!. We need to recaptialise the whole frigate fleet soon, we need to try and find money for Astute-8, we need investment in CEC, UAV’s, additional satellite bandwidth to bring our net-centricity and fleet ISTAR potential up to date.
Carrier Strike with CVF/STOVL is intended to, in peacetime, support a ‘golf-bag’ airgroup of perhaps a single dozen-airframe squadron of fastjets, plus Merlins, Chinooks, Apache’s and UAV’s supporting a comprhensive expeditionary EMF. Its role is to provide a fully organic, rapid-deployment capability for dealing with the multiple low-intensity threats that occur in routine peacetime conditions like Operation Palliser or Operation Highbrow. The ships STOVL airgroup allows for non deck-rated squadrons to rapidly deploy to the ship to have the vessel operating as a 100-sortie-a-day strike carrier within the length of time it takes to stage the squadrons to the ship and land ashore all those units unnecessary to the new tasking.
I cannot really see any major problem with our pilots coping with CATOBAR ops,it just means we will stop doing it different!!
Of course this CAN be done with CATOBAR squadrons. The problem is though of what you do with the other front line squadron while it isnt embarked. The pilots have to undergo continuation training to keep their deck quals up so they cant go on 3-6 month shore-based deployments, with the light blue, otherwise they wont be available to rapid-deploy to the carrier. So you have 60-70% of the Fleet Air Arm sat at the expensively newly expanded RNAS Yeovilton doing circuits, weapons training and waiting for a passing CATOBAR carrier deck to do some deck quals on!.
RAF pilots used to convert to carrier ops on exchange postings without the benefit of any proper training,whereas nowadays they would have the benefit of excellent simulators and proper deck landing trainers.
Absolutely not. In the USN their Tailhook programme involves 58 flights across a 27 week period. An accelerated programme is provided, I believe, for continuation training for Aeronavale and Indian Navy pilots now, but, you are still talking weeks of workups to get CATOBAR deck-rated.
Remember while the CATOBAR pilots are doing all this qualification training the equivalent STOVL pilots could actually be on operations doing their jobs from shore bases wherever. If they had a sudden retasking order to deploy to the carrier all that would be required is to stage the aircraft to the ship and make sure that any additional support/maintenance hands required by the bigger airgroup were dispatched with them.
Some people seem to want our naval a/c to remain inferior performance- wise.
Some people also know how insignificant, in strategic terms, a marginal aircraft performance decrease is when compared to the operational advantages on offer.
JonesyI just don’t believe that, either figures are being worked to look good or people are picking on different ways to compare costs, but I can’t believe that the F-35B with its stealth technology and incredibly complex lift engine and control systems, is only a little bit more expensive than a Super Hornet.
No-one is saying that a single F-35B is cheaper than a single F/A-18E.
What people are trying to explain is that it doesnt really matter, within reason, what the price differential in the individual aircraft is. The major factor is in cost to deploy the capability.
F-35B allows the continued sharing of infrastructure, training, logistics and provides easy operational deployment factors. It slots in very easily to the basic Joint Force Harrier structure and it supports the ‘golf-bag’ deployability nature of the UK Carrier Strike requirement.
Any new build CATOBAR type means that developed structure is thrown away and whole new, seperate, basing (unless you think the RAF will host 3 squadrons of RN Hornets gratis!), logistics and training pipelines will have to be built from scratch to support the capability. Thats before we get to the carriers themselves needing to be expensively, in whole life terms, modified to operate the CATOBAR type and RN personnel trained in operating a CATOBAR carrier, different to the way a STOVL carrier is handled, and the launch/recovery kit specific to the aircraft.
This is an issue that goes a very long way beyond the cost of an aircraft as it rolls off a production line.
JonesyIts the RAF that regularly offers up the Red Arrows at every budget cutting session not some dimwit minister!. Its a very good example of the efficacy of the Light Blue’s PR machine and its a routine that they have perfected over the years.
Any time things are looking likely to get really painful for them they offer to do away with the Reds as a way to ‘preserve frontline funding’ knowing full well that the money spent on them is trivial and, as stated, gets a huge return in recruitment and PR terms. They make sure each offer to sacrifice the Reds gets out into media as well as they know there will be a public outcry over the poor treatment of the RAF by the nasty government!.
Got to admire slick operators haven’t you!.
JonesyIn the USN, you *might* launch light on fuel to maximize your weps loadout, then tank for range. If the F-35B has no tanking option, range is limited to an extent.
Again though thats the USN not us. We dont have the USN’s realtime long range ISTAR (ie satellite) capability to support manned deep strike taskings. Our deep strike capability is going to be based off sub-TLAM and Storm Shadow from the -35B’s against fixed targets. Storm Shadow obviously lending 150+ miles to the 35B’s strike radius.
Range is nice in that it lets you place your carrier farther back offshore or range deeper inland, but, if you only know about fixed targets anyway there is little need for manned overflights when you have standoff weapons.
Endurance is important but, again, return fuel reserves for -35B can be lower than for CATOBAR types because of the lack of risk of repeated bolters and go-arounds. That does offset things a little!.
Jonesyand what about the AWACS question?
AWACS Osprey has been developed, apparently, using the palletised Thales Cerberus kit that is, allegedly, slated for RN Merlin. I prefer the UAV approach personally – utilising the Merlin as an offboard C3 node.
JonesyTry telling that to the GR.3 pilots that landed on Illustrious after two 9hr flights from the UK back in ’83. The thing is the capability has always been there, the two forces haven’t co-operated very easily in the past, something they have to do now and which makes operating and training on a common type easier.
I think this lack of apparent heavy training needed on the F-35 is a bit of a misnomer peronally.
Hmmm a CATOBAR recovery from a pilot who’s never done one or a STOVL recovery from a pilot who’s never done one?. Who’s got the easier task?.
Fact is there are numerous instances of RAF Harrier pilots simply going straight into a carrier landing unpracticed and very, very few mishaps. A situation utterly impossible without STOVL.
Sign In
