Push a Button, Land on a Carrier

sane? writes "Putting an aircraft down on a carrier in bad weather is the stuff of melodramatic Hollywood films. Automated systems for conventional aircraft and big carriers has been done for a while, but getting a hovering Harrier, helicopter, or future JSF to land on a pitching deck of a smaller ship is a different matter. This week QinetiQ demonstrated a complete autoland - a significant step towards making the future JSF work."

Land on a Carrier?

[Mensa Babe]

The correct headline sould be: Push a button and land on a carrier as long as there is no software "glitch" or any single thing unforseen by the programmers, because unlike a real pilot, the computer will not quickly learn new skills to survive. Or are they going to make the system perfect, just like ABS, or ATMs, or PC software? Good luck.

Technology for the 'flying car'??

[guyfromindia]

From TFA
The simplicity of the new system was aptly demonstrated when a pilot with no previous fast jet experience, safely landed a STOVL aircraft unaided - a feat unimaginable before.
That's pretty amazing! Wonder if similar technology will one day pave the way for the 'flying car'. Automatically controlling landing and takeoff for a domestic 'flying car' will go a long way in making it practically feasible...

Re:It doesn't look precise enough

[Junta]

Is it though? When driving your car, can you confidently say you know within a margin of error of 10 cm *exactly* where your car is, 1/3rd of a foot? You can bet pilots don't know within 10cm where there plane is relative to anything outside the plane. If any operation of such a large vehicle operated by a person required better than 10cm of precision to avoid damage, there would be serious problems..

Great line recited by Frederick March

[vudufixit]

In the underrated, underappreciated film Bridges at Toko-Ri: "Where do we get such men? They leave this ship and they do their job; then they must find this speck, lost somewhere on the sea, and when they have found it they have to land on its pitching deck. Where do we get such men?"

Canadians got it right (again)

[y2imm]

Since the 60s we've been winching down our SeaKings, that is, when they're weren't falling out of the sky on their own...

http://www.readyayeready.com/timeline/1960s/beartr ap/ [readyayeready.com]

Um...

[ctr2sprt]

Automated systems for conventional aircraft and big carriers has been done for a while, but getting a hovering Harrier, helicopter, or future JSF to land on a pitching deck of a smaller ship is a different matter.

I'm not sure I follow how this is supposed to be harder than landing a jet on a carrier. I have no doubts whatsoever that it's a difficult process no matter what your vehicle, don't get me wrong. But with a VTOL aircraft you primarily worry about adjustments in one dimension (altitude). With a traditional aircraft you have to worry about two (forward velocity plus altitude). With a helicopter, for instance, as long as you "float" over the deck without hitting anything, you can land anywhere. With a jet, you have to hit a very small patch of deck to catch the tailhooks and arrest your forward motion.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, I may be wrong. An aircraft's altitude is controlled significantly by its forward speed. (Go faster, you go higher; go slower, you go lower.) Perhaps it is mainly a one-dimensional problem. Still, I don't see how landing a jet is markedly easier than landing a helicopter.

I guess I can summarize this post by saying, "I'm ignorant. Someone with more than a handful of hours of flight time, please enlighten me." (Yes, I have flown single-engine Cessnas, but only the aforementioned handful of hours. Takeoff but not landing, and certainly not on an aircraft carrier. My "knowledge" there is mainly from my father, who was a Navy fighter pilot in the late 1940s, so that "knowledge" doesn't even extend to jets.)

Re:Um...

[YrWrstNtmr]

With a traditional jet, you have to hit a small specific area on the deck. The ship is moving forward, possibly pitching or rolling at the same time. But the ships forward speed is a small fraction of the aircrafts forward speed.

Landing vertically, helicopter or Harrier, you have to match the forward speed of the ship (maybe 10-20 knots), compensate for pitch and roll so the deck doesn't come up and slap your landing gear off, and adjust for your own ground effect as you near the surface of the deck. Also, depending on space and where you're supposed to set down, you may be coming down not in line with the ship, but maybe trying to fly sideways at 15 knots.

It's not necessarily easier or harder, just a different set of conditions that need to be met and compensated for.

My Jock

[Anonymous Coward]

As swashbuckling as fighter jocks can be (I've known a few) if an automated landing system proved near perfect there would be quite a few who would be happy to sign up for it.

Even the most self assured pilots hate landing (read: controlled crash-landing) on carriers at night in adverse conditions. Scares the crap out of them.

But there would be some resistance. As there are people who are better coders than others there are pilots who are better at landing on an aircraft carrier than others. As a matter of fact naval pilots on a carrier are constantly graded and ranked according to their landing performance. And I can't see the good ones wanting to give up control over the aircraft or wanting to give up their status as a top naval pilot.

RAST

[smittyoneeach]

US Navy Spruance[1], Ticonderoga, and Perry class ships have a Recovery Assist, Securing, and Traversal system that reels in an SH60B, locks it in place on the deck, and then can pull it into the hangar, once the origami is done.
Sometimes, a good ol' fashioned electro-hydraulic system is OK.

[1]Didn't fact-check to discover if any remain in commission.

Re:Um...

[Xochil]

I can't speak for VTOL, as US aircraft carriers (CVs and CVNs) do not normally carry them. Having been helo aircrew for hundreds of shipboard landings (mostly CV, but quite a few small boy decks as well), I can say you don't just float over the deck and put her down.

On a carrier, you're directed to land on one of 5-6 circles called "spots" Spots 1-2 are generally at near the bow, 3-4 (where most HS [the type of squadron deployed on carriers] landings occur are port side aft of the angled deck, and 5-6 are near the stern.

If you miss your spot, the air boss will personally check in to whether your wings should be pulled. ; )

No question about it, it's easier to land a helo on a CV/CVN than a fixed winger. However, I took the comment about smaller ships to imply frigates, destroyers, crusiers, and the like. It is definitely not easy to land on one of those when the deck is pitching all over the place. The RAST systems in use by much of the HSL community helps, but send a non RAST-equipped helo to a small boy in high seas...and the pucker factor is high.

--Mike

The helos are always the first to take off and last to land.

Re:Um...

[HardCase]

No question about it, it's easier to land a helo on a CV/CVN than a fixed winger. However, I took the comment about smaller ships to imply frigates, destroyers, crusiers, and the like. It is definitely not easy to land on one of those when the deck is pitching all over the place. The RAST systems in use by much of the HSL community helps, but send a non RAST-equipped helo to a small boy in high seas...and the pucker factor is high.

After spending five years aboard a US Navy FFG, I have a lot of respect for the helo crew. Landing on a deck that's pitching up and down over a range of five to ten feet, plus rolling a total of 30 degrees is tough enough - but right in front of the aircraft is a solid wall of metal that would cheerfully shred the rotors. Plus, the ship is moving.

When the SH-60B that we carried landed, the tail extended over the end of the flight deck. It's a big helicopter landing in a very small spot. And I've got to say that the five or six times that I flew, the landing was absolutely terrifying. And these guys were flying several missions a day whenever we were at sea.

Oh, and RAST was broken half of the time, too.

-h-

Photoshopped logo?

[KFury]

Did anyone else notice that the QinetiQ logo 'painted' on the body of the fighter appears to be just a poor photoshop job? Looks like their logo wasn't on the aircraft (or at least visible in this shot) so they decided to slap one on after the fact.

High-res photo [qinetiq.com] and a zoomed close-up [fury.com]

Pilots are pretty damn good

[A nonymous Coward]

When I was on a carrier (supply clerk, ha!) in the 1970s, there was a TV camera in the yellow line of the landing strip down the angle. It seemed like half the time, the two nose wheels of an F-4 would go down opposite sides of that TV camera as I watched in my spare time on the ship's TV system. This is landing at probably well over 150 knots in a cross wind on a platform which is rolling, pitching, and changing elevation. One night every single pilot, I think 98 traps, hit the right wire.

I'd say they can get within 10cm no sweat. Navy pilots are damned good.

SNC did it first

[dmh20002]

Sierra Nevada Corporation [sncorp.com] designed and built the system that performed the first automatic landings of VTOL and fixed wing UAV's on small ships in the mid 1990's. The VTOL UAV was the Bombardier CL-327 and the fixed wing UAV was the IAI Pioneer. See the videos [sncorp.com]. I know because I was part of the team. The level of difficulty is exactly the same as landing a manned aircraft (maybe more because there is no pilot to take over in the event of problems). We built the 35ghz tracking radar system and designed and implemented all the autoland algorithms including the special purpose autopilot code (it has to be much higher gain than a normal autopilot) and the ship motion stabilization.
A variant of this system is autolanding UAV's all over Iraq as we speak.

Russians had automatic landing in 1988

[melted]

Except you didn't even have to press any buttons. The thing flew and landed all by itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran [wikipedia.org]

Canadians have it figured out

[lommer]

The Canadian Navy has pioneered a system similar to RAST for their operations in the North Atlantic. They still fly ancient sea king helicopters on tiny frigates that pitch all over the place, but they can land in higher seas than anyone else. They lower a steel cable to the deck, where is is secured to a winch. The helicopter hovers over the landing spot, trying to get into position. A ship-based crew judges when the timing is perfect and activates the winch. It slams the helo on to the deck pretty much instantaneously. The landing is hard, but it works. The only problem they have with it is that our oldest sea kings still have vacuum tube avionics, and when they perform this manouvre the shock of landing breaks every single tube on the bird.