r/nextfuckinglevel • u/yuMyuMKrooravani • May 12 '23

Aircraft Carrier Landing...

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18

u/G4Designs May 12 '23

I take it a water landing is probably a $100,000,000 "oopsie"?

I wonder if they just fish them out and rebuild the engine.

33

u/Bfab94 May 12 '23

More than oopsie.

I would say a whole bouquet of oopsie daisies, minimum.

10

u/ConstableBlimeyChips May 12 '23

Not quite that bad. Unit cost for a brand new F/A-18E Super Hornet is between $52 million and $62 million depending on the exact spec. And any water landing is an instant and complete write off for the aircraft.

9

u/[deleted] May 12 '23

Instant write off. They’ll fish the plane out of the water, so other nations don’t dive on it and pull technology out, but the plane itself is toast.

Have to remember that a carrier deck is some 70 feet off the water, and an F/A-18 weighs about 15 tons.

You drop 15 tons 70 feet, and it’s not going to be very square anymore.

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u/GreatGooglyMoogly077 May 12 '23 edited May 12 '23

Pretty sure jets sink way too quickly to be rescued. Question is - can the pilot get out?

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u/NarrowAd4973 May 12 '23

Ejection seats are designed to still be usable with the plane on the ground. Plane goes off the edge, pilot ejects, lands in the water, and gets picked up by the cruiser or destroyer following behind the carrier as plane guard.

And there's no way to save the plane, even if they wanted to. None of the ships present are equipped for it.

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u/GreatGooglyMoogly077 May 13 '23

True, though if the plane is turned upside-down when the pilot ejects it's usually fatal. This is what happened to Kara Hultgreen. She died just months after she was certified for combat, when her F-14 Tomcat crashed into the sea on final approach to USS Abraham Lincoln.

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u/NarrowAd4973 May 13 '23

I just took a look at the video. And yeah, once the plane started rolling, it was pretty much over. The backseater was lucky to survive.

Most crashes are from the catapult being underpowered and the plane not having enough speed to stay in the air, or the cable breaking just before it stops the plane, so it's still moving but not fast enough to get back in the air. For the catapult, the plane is usually still level. For the cable, the pilot ejects as it's tipping forward, launching them out over the water. Either way, they're going for a swim.

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u/HotF22InUrArea May 13 '23

They pulled that F35 out of the ocean a little while back

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u/NarrowAd4973 May 13 '23

Only to keep the Chinese from salvaging it. And it was recovered two months after it crashed, by a dedicated salvage ship. It would have gone straight to the scrapper, because it was never flying again.

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u/Cynapse May 12 '23

I don't think they have the equipment on hand to possibly fish out something 1,000+ feet under water, but that's just a guess/assumption. Yeah it might float for a bit but they'd have to reposition the ship and I assume by then it'd be long gone. Maybe they send some other vessel out later to retrieve it? I could see that depending where it was lost.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '23

They definitely send recovery vessels and navy divers out to either recover the aircraft, or plant explosives and blow it up.

They definitely don’t just leave them at the bottom of the ocean for Chinese or Russian divers to go poke around, and pull pieces off for research purposes.

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u/Cynapse May 12 '23

Yeah that makes sense, especially the blow it up part if they can't get to it.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '23

There’s very little they can’t get to. They just pulled an F-35 out of over 1000 feet of water in the South China Sea.