I grew up in an Army home as my dad was West Point and Korea . I just watched the movie Dauntless and haveto say those WW2 Naval pilots were pretty damn good . God Bless all of them as well as all military pilots . Thank you all from the bottom of my heart .

Naval pilots are more than "pretty damn good." I spent a couple years of my navy career on a carrier and they are very, very good. The Air Force and Army pilots as well as most Marine pilots get to take off and land on the ground. That means they have at least a mile of runway. Naval pilots only have 200 yards of ship to land on and that isn't holding steady when they do it.

There is a reason why the POTUS always asks where the nearest carrier is when things get heated up.

In my world he always asks where his Blackhawks are. But, to give credit where credit is due, yes, the Navy pilots have it tough.

kwg

I hadn't heard about that movie. The Dauntless and the Avenger were my two favorite WWII planes.

Well, flying an Apache under night systems viewed in a green1-in square monocle, low-level in [bleep] weather at IR crossover will make most airplane pilots opt for a carrier deck instead, I assure you. And these days most have or soon will have fully-coupled approach to landing.

more than a couple of Naval Aviation types on here...

The Dauntless was a better plane than its "replacement", the Helldiver. Not often that that happens.

I appreciate everything helo guys do and the ability to get down in nap of the earth and an incredible weapons system. But…… if you have a fuel or engine problem you have a few options. . At the boat you have fly your head through a window about 2’ tall and 3’wide. It’s a skill that we start to develop in flight students as soon as they start training in jets.

In bad weather the sky is gray, the water is gray and guess what color the boat is….. Usually the first thing you see is the ramp (the tail end of the flight deck which is white). At night, in the F-4, we were “trick or treat” on our first pass, Meaning you had one shot at it and if you “boltered” you went right up to the tanker, took some gas and went right back to try again. In many cases there was no divert; land it or eject. The Tomcat was a little more forgiving with fuel consumption.

Search “pitching deck operations” on Google. If you find “Carrier” on the History Channe (?)l it’ll give you an idea about how it is to get aboard with a pitching deck. I know about 2/3 of the guys they show.

We could couple-up even in the F-4 and F-14 as early as the mid-late ‘70’s but the systems were really hard to keep up and few, if any, of them were certified to fly it all the way to touchdown. When it was working we’d usually kick it off and about 3/4 mile. Nowadays aircraft have much more sophisticated data link and it’s “put the thing on the thing”

And my apologies to Naval Aviators - I was defending us Army RW aviators, not intending to denigrate other service aviators - my choice of words was rather irresponsible of me.