They’re about to find out just how hard it is to run one. It has this amazing statistic that I’d never seen before:
Between 1949, when the U.S. Navy began deploying jets on a large scale, and 1988, when the combined Navy/Marine Corps aircraft accident rate achieved U.S. Air Force levels, the Navy and Marine Corps lost almost 12,000 aircraft and more than 8,500 aircrew.
Emphasis mine. That’s accidents, not combat. And what they mean by getting the rate to Air Force levels, is reducing it to that rate. In other words, those are the casualties of learning how to fly combat-proficient aircraft from carriers, and it didn’t really occur until the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet.
Here’s a related link: the U.S. Navy’s transition to jets.
And yet we obsess about safety in spaceflight.
[Via email from Jim Bennett]
That F9F-2 Panther is quite the pretty aircraft.
Yes, and it’s descendent the F11F Tiger looked perfect, like what a jet fighter should look like.
I remember seeing them perform in the Blue Angels, it must have been at North Island NAS a long long time ago.
and it didn’t really occur until the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet.
Where, if I’m recalling correctly, they started getting computer-based heads-up-display info and ‘steering’ them onto the deck.
The average number of training deaths in the U.S. Military [this includes the Coast Guard for these stats] is and has been one death per day, per branch, 365 or 24 x 7 whichever term you prefer, and it’s been that way for years.
That is not to say that 5 people die everyday, it’s an average. It sounds like an outrageous number, until you take any other group of 1.5M people and look at how many die in a day. If the number I found was right it’s 3.5 per 100K, in 2010.
So, that 5 per day doesn’t sound high now, does it?
On a related note, I read somewhere that we lost about 17,000 men in WW-II in aircraft accidents in the continental US. That’s seven times higher than the casualty rate of the Iraq War, and that’s just from learning to fly, test flying, and shuttling troops between domestic airports.
And yes, the F9F was a very pretty aircraft. They land the F-18’s by maintaining a 9.1 degree AOA all the way to the deck.
Looks like this just about ensures that Japan will go ahead with their new class of “helicopter destroyers” and probably add jets to it 🙂
http://www.ships-net.co.jp/detl/201006/001-006e.html
South Korea also has some eerily similar helicopter carriers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dokdo_class_amphibious_assault_ship
Like in the case of the Japanese they are considering buying F-35Bs for them. Assuming the program actually goes forward to completion.
Godzilla,
Yes, if the program goes through. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Japan makes a deal with the Royal Navy for the Harriers they retired last year.
I don’t know. Harriers have a high accident rate. I’ve read that the easiest way to get a Harrier of your own is to buy 10 acres outside of Cherry Point and wait for one to crash on your property. Given what happened in Afghanistan a couple weeks ago, our own Marines might be interested in those Harriers even if they are different from the AV-8Bs they operate.
Yes I imagine that China will learn that running a carrier is not easy nor simple. But this should not lead us to dismiss the event:
The only way to learn how to do carrier ops is to do carrier ops. If the Chinese are normal people of normal intelligence and normal motivation (and they are), they will sail, make mistakes, learn from them, and become proficient in carrier ops. There’s nothing magical about carrier ops.
And we’ve cleared away a lot of the hard learning for everyone.
Given enough time, and enough PLAN money and manpower, China will become proficient in carrier ops, become able to build carriers, and will have a fleet to reckon with if they want one.
It would be rassist to think otherwise.
Except that lots of nations have tried, and only the US has succeeded, and continued to succeed for more than one generation. Carrier ops on the level of full-up combat jets (not helicopters and jump-jets) is HARD. It’s expensive, it’s dangerous, and requires a high level of training and competence by everyone involved, not just a few mid-level career officers and non-coms. The Soviet navy couldn’t do it. The British couldn’t afford to keep doing it. The French make a pretense of doing it, there are arguments as to whether they succeed. The Chinese can probably do it, but it’s certainly not guaranteed.
Japan succeeded VERY well in the 30’s and 40’s.
For most of your examples it was a question of money and usefulness to the foreign policy.
My only point was that there’s no reason to expect the Chinese cannot do carrier ops if they are serious about it.
Their space agency might also realize that plucking a capsule out of the ocean with an aircraft carrier looks a little classier than driving a truck through the boonies to find the capsule sitting on someone’s outhouse next to their pig lot.
“And yet we obsess about safety in spaceflight.”
I’ve long maintained that if NASA were given the task of landing an airplane on a ship, they would, following a ten-year, $5 billion dollar “risk reduction phase,” conclude that such a thing could not be done. The same pertains to almost everything the Navy routinely does.
NASA used to make extensive use of aircraft carriers, but they never considered trying to land on one when the ocean was a much bigger and softer target.
The Chinese have already stated they intend to have 3 aircraft carriers. This refurbished carrier and two other newly built carriers. The stated aim is to use the carriers to ensure Chinese access to Middle Eastern oil by securing the sea routes from the Middle East to China.
It is unknown if these newly built carriers will have ski-ramps or catapults. If they have catapults it is unknown if they are steam catapults or they will use electromagnetic launch. The Chinese have the Transrapid maglev technology they bought from the Germans for the Shanghai airport maglev line so it is not impossible they will have electromagnetic launch.
The Chinese have the largest shipyards in the world at Dalian so they certainly have the means to build the carriers.
Regarding pilot training the Chinese have already built replicas of the carrier deck on land to train fighter pilots in carrier ops:
http://defensetech.org/2011/08/03/chinas-carrier-on-dry-land/
Today we also have computer flight simulators, which the Chinese are known to use, so a lot of training can be done without fuel or actual hardware. The Chinese also have a copy of the Su-33 carrier fighter called J-15 which is already flying:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-15
Which you can see in a picture in PLANAF livery.
The J-15 is based on a Su-33 prototype the Chinese bought from Ukraine. The carrier is probably powered by Ukrainian turbines using Chinese electronics and weapon systems from their destroyer program. I also suspect their latest stealth fighter prototype is intended to have a carrier bourne version because of their engine selection.
What would be the most likely target of Chicom carriers? South Korea? North Korea? Japan? Southeast Asia? India? Philippines? Magadan? Alaska? That island from “Lost?”
As I said their stated intention is to use the carriers to protect the sea lanes from the Middle East to China. The Chinese have already sent vessels to the Gulf of Aden in anti-piracy missions. There is also a lot of piracy in the South China sea. If anything the carriers can be used to dissuade 3rd parties from interfering with Chinese merchant marine.
Regarding the ” U.S. Navy’s transition to jets.” article:
I found this one statistic VERY surprising:
“In all, 1,261 Crusaders were built. By the time it was withdrawn from the fleet, 1,106 had been involved in mishaps.”
That’s a little hard to believe. So I asked my Navy buddy – Robert Shaw (author of “Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering”) if he was aware of that prang rate. He was flying for the Navy right around that time.
He said the F8 was pretty hard to land aboard, but that rate doesn’t seem right to him. There were a number of F8 squadrons when he was at Miramar and he cannot recall one accident over several years. Of course they aren’t flying off of carriers then, but still..
“Mishaps”doesn’t mean aircraft destroyed. Hard landings resulting in some airframe damage or inspection required, burst tires, running off far end of runway into grass or gravel, RTB after takeoff due to a systems failure etc can count as mishaps.
Did you read on? The author then said:
“While the F-8 statistics might have been worse than those for most other models, they make the magnitude of the problem clear: whether from engine failure, pilot error, weather, or bad luck, the vast majority (88 percent!) of Crusaders ever built ended up as smoking holes in the ground, splashes in the water, or fireballs hurtling across a flight deck. ”
The author is not talking about just running off the end of the runway or RTB after systems failure. He’s talking about total a/c loss.
BTW the source of those numbers appears to be Wikipedia.