It is much harder to steer a boat than it is a land vehicle. The presence of ground-based friction enables rapid changes in direction on land but that is absent in water. The bigger the boat is, the harder it is to change its direction of motion. I have sometimes compared large institutions to aircraft carriers, using that as a metaphor for how some of them change direction very slowly.
So I was surprised to read this report of an aircraft carrier engaging in zig-zag motion to escape hostile fire, with the resulting swerving being sufficient to result in a jet fighter falling into the sea.
US sailors had to leap for their lives when a fighter jet fell off a navy aircraft carrier that was reportedly making evasive maneuvers to avoid Houthi militant fire in the Red Sea on Monday.
The F/A-18 fighter Super Hornet jet, along with the vehicle towing it into place on the deck of the USS Harry S Truman, rolled right out of the hangar and into the water, the navy said.
Unnamed US officials indicated to CNN that the ship was swerving to avoid incoming fire from Yemen’s Houthi rebel force. Carriers make a zigzag maneuver when attempting to evade missile fire, causing them to list to one side.
It looks like I will need to find a new metaphor for large, slowly changing institutions.
The article seems to suggest that this type of swerving of aircraft carriers is not uncommon, which makes me wonder why there was no system in place to avoid this kind of catastrophe. It is likely because those responsible for making sure the plane was secured properly were DEI hires or transgender, because members of those two groups are the cause of all the ills that beset this country.
That last sentence is brilliant but I’m confident an eight-figure subset of the ‘Murican population would buy it enthusiastically.
Well, the easiest way to avoid it is to stop giving the Houthis a reason to be firing on the ship in the first place.
Mano, do a search for “aircraft carrier maneuvers”. There are a lot of amazing videos. ⚓
I feel this is a very important thing to remember next time one is playing “Battleship”
“G4”!
“Nope, too late”.
Parked aircraft on aircraft carriers have hefty wheel chocks on the wheels them to prevent them from moving.
Since this one was being towed, the chocks were obviously not in place. This isn’t the first plane that goes overboard inadvertently on a carrier, and it probably won’t be the last.
Carriers are a pretty dangerous workplace. Even if you’re not being shot at.
This campaign against the houthis is becoming quite expensive for the US.
While talking to a friend I recently compared the tariffs mess to a couple vehicles. The regime acts like they’re driving a lightweight motorcycle that can stop on a dime and accelerate very quickly. But they’re actually on a fully loaded freight train and it’s not even close to doing either of those things.
“I will need to find a new metaphor for large, slowly changing institutions.”
Oil tankers/supertankers. That’s what I’ve always heard used as the canonical example of something not necessarily slow, but very slow to *steer* specifically.
I looked at some of the videos recommended by larpar @#3, and it seems to me that I was misled by the use of the words ‘swerve’ and ‘zig zag’ used in the original article to think that its was the centrifugal forces generated by changes in direction at high speed that caused the plane to fall off the vessel. That puzzled me because the speed of an aircraft carrier cannot be that high and the turning radius must be quite large so the centrifugal forces would be quite small.
But what it looks like is that it is the tilting of the ship’s deck as it does the maneuvers that must have caused the plane to slide off. This tilting was caused by the change of direction but the proximate cause of falling off was gravity, not centrifugal forces.
“the speed of an aircraft carrier cannot be that high”
35mph,typically. This is twice as fast as an oil tanker. Bow thrusters and the like can reduce the turning circle. They’re amazing pieces of technology.
There is footage to be found of the big carriers undergoing acceptance tests. It’s pretty amazing. Those huge things can turn so hard they’re tilting about 30 degrees. I suppose it’s to dodge incoming torpedoes. Modern antiship missiles are more nimble.
Carrier proponents insist that for all intents and purposes they are unsinkable. Submariners insist that they are sitting ducks. Unfortunately there are no longer battleship proponents, but they used to insist that everything that floats or is unfortunate enough to be 16 miles from deep water, can be sunk.
You made me look stuff up.
There are publicly available videos of US carriers making sharp turns. Obviously for security reasons no actual test is going to be publicly available. If their top speed and tightest turning radius is known, it is not by us-readers here.
In all of them their decks are empty. I also see a number of sources that say they are the fastest military ship at sea -almost. I mean, our nation’s enemies aren’t likely to reveal how fast they can go either, right? This seems mildly pointless puffery because they have escort ships for good reason. If you are needing the outrunning of your escorts, you are in very bad shape overall.
I saw a great interview with the last commander of the BB New Jersey. He had fascinating insights and pictures. One of the things he said was that, no matter how maneuverable an aircraft carrier or battle ship can be, you can find situations where the battle ship commander has an accident, and it takes 20 minutes for the accident to fully mature.
I guess a battle ship captain is the peak of US Navy sea command, especially in peacetime.
There’s a great book: The Yard, which describes the construction of a comparatively itty-bitty missile frigate.
When you get to mad stories like building the great battleships you begin to realize what ridiculous engineering people are capable of when there’s high explosive to be delivered. For example, each of the turrets in a battle ship like New Jersey is 5-6 storeys tall, rotates independently on very large cylindrical bearings, and weighs as much as a destroyer. So a battleship is a really big ship with 5 medium sized ships on its deck, that can rotate and shoot at other ships.
The Yard describes the problem of having a bunch of many ton missiles launch below the ship’s deck without it overbalancing and playing sea turtle.
The US economy is a much better metaphor. There’s no way you could cause it to decline significantly in the span of, let’s pick an arbitrary number, 100 days.
Hegseth added the Houthi chief to his signal chat this time ?
I wonder if it would be possible to build katamaran aircraft carriers. They would not experience tilt to the same degree, and would also be more stable in bad weather and be able to endure more torpedo damage.
As the aircraft take off at an angle you could have two ‘island’ superstructures instead of one.
Even modern carriers are very sinkable, see:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-100-million-swedish-submarine-sunk-6-billion-us-supercarrier-208833