“The Vampire was the first aircraft to deliberately land on a moving aircraft carrier..”
This quote from Airshow Luke, our MC at the Legacy of Liberty air show, almost made me lose sight of the plane. Not because I doubted the statement. The DH-100 Vampire was one of the first single-engine aircraft, so it made sense that it could have been the first to land on an aircraft carrier. No, it was the use of the word “deliberately” that threw me off.
How do you land on an aircraft carrier by accident?
It seems hard to imagine what this could mean, so of course I had to go looking…
The first plane to land on a ship was in 1911. The plane was a Curtiss Pusher biplane, piloted by Eugene Burton Ely, part of the Curtiss display team. The Navy asked Ely directly if he would like to try it, which he did, and Curtiss thought it was a great idea. First, the Navy modified the USS Birmingham with an 83-foot wooden platform and attached floats to the wings of the Curtiss Pusher.
I have to say that I’m not sure I would describe that takeoff as all that successful.
Here is the account National Air and Space Museum.
Ely narrowly managed to make the first takeoff of a ship. The Curtiss rolled off the edge of the platform, came to rest and briefly jumped out of the water, damaging the propeller. Ely managed to stay airborne and landed 2 ½ miles away on the nearest land, called Willoughby Spit.
However, Ely was willing to attempt the landing. For this attempt, the Navy added a 120-foot deck to the USS Pennsylvania, paid for by the Curtiss Airplane Company. They laid twenty-two hemp cables along the platform, held in place with 50-pound sandbags. At the end of the platform there was a canvas awning to catch the plane.
The Curtiss Pusher was modified to have longer wings and landing gear hooks. Ely was wearing bicycle inner tubes and a football helmet.
Again from the National Air and Space Museum:
Crowds lined the shore and ships gathered in the harbor to witness the daring flight. At 11:00 a.m., Ely took off from nearby Tanforan Racecourse and headed for Pennsylvania. To the delight of thousands of spectators, Ely made a safe landing and the arresting equipment worked perfectly. After lunch with the ship’s captain and some photographs, the deck was cleared and the Pennsylvania headed into the wind. Ely took off, flew through the crowd, and landed safely on Tanforan. Naval aviation was born.
That brings us to why it was difficult to land turbojet-powered planes, specifically. The problem is that an aircraft carrier is a moving runway, which rises and falls with the waves. With a piston engine, you can quickly open the throttle to get a little more lift or decelerate backwards for more resistance. But jet engines are slow to respond, which means it’s much harder to synchronize the plane with the ship.
The US Navy claims that the “first landing of a jet aircraft on an aircraft carrier” was achieved with a Ryan FR-1 Fireball, flown by US Navy pilot Jake West.
Much to my amusement, the problem with this “first” is No that accidentally landed on an aircraft carrier, but was accidentally a jet.
The Ryan Fireball was designed as a carrier fighter. Fast and light, it was a compound-powered aircraft, with a piston engine and a jet engine. The landings were made using only the piston engine, but as West approached to land on the USS Wake Islandthe piston engine failed. The ship raised a protective barrier for the emergency landing. West started the jet engine and continued the landing on the jet engine. The fireball passed through all of the arresting wires except the last one, before crashing into the safety barrier.
The point here is that West does not intentionally Land a plane on an aircraft carrier. There are also questions about whether the piston engine suffered only partial failure, so that West was able to use both the piston and the jet to land.
Despite these warnings, the US Navy still claims that this is the first aircraft landing on an aircraft carrier, which I assume it is if you avoid the words “deliberately” and “successful.”
A month later, in December 1945, Royal Navy test pilot Eric Melrose Brown landed a prototype de Havilland Vampire (LZ551/G) at HMS. Ocean.
I had already had success testing the de Havilland Mosquito for carrier landings, so it was the obvious choice for this test.
Brown explains:
After this, the idea of landing a plane on an aircraft carrier arose.
Brown was immediately interested, as he admitted in an interview from historia.netbecause he had “a tremendous desire to beat the Yankees.”
This time the aircraft was the second prototype of the DH-100 Vampire, Britain’s first single-engine fighter aircraft. The prototype was modified with larger flaps, heavy-duty shock absorbers in the landing gear, and a reinforced structure (presumably in case it also crashed into the safety barrier).
On the day of the test flight, the weather was marginal; The flight took place in what Brown called “a knife-edge decision” to attempt to land on HMS. Ocean.
The waves were high and the boat was rocking in the waves. According Vulcan to heavenIn the interview with Brown in 2015, the carrier told him to return to Ford. Brown claimed he did not have enough fuel to return. The captain cleared the deck and Brown pointed to the fourth of the ten arresting cables. But then he miscalculated the upward movement of the deck.
“Landing on the deck is a bit like Russian roulette,” says Eric, because the pilot is at the mercy of the sea. This triggers his second revelation. “I landed too early. You try to get momentum. I didn’t get momentum at the right time. This meant I landed further back than I intended.” And just like that, Eric landed on the first cable (and the back of the Vampire touched the platform).
Brown then took off again in what was indisputably the first takeoff of an aircraft from an aircraft carrier, later commenting that the Vampiro took off “like a scalded cat!” Brown made four landings that day (and caught the fourth arresting wire on the fourth attempt).
The first takeoff and landing from a US Navy aircraft carrier was seven months later, in July 1946, by a McDonnell XFD-1 Phantom.
So that’s the whole mystery: Airshow MC Luke is absolutely right that the Vampire Jet was the first jet aircraft to deliberately land on an aircraft carrier.
And as an extra prize, Brown’s memoirs, wings on my sleeveIt was just added to my wish list.
