Shore trials were flown by Lieutenant Commander Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown DSC AFC RN who flew a modified Vampire prototype, TG 286, and several specially modified naval Sea Vampire F 21s. The pilot was to treat each approach as a potential miss until he felt the retardation as his hook took the single arrester wire rigged across the deck.
The Admiralty was sufficiently interested in this potential solution to devote money, manpower and resources to evaluate to it during a period of severe post-war austerity.Ī flexible deck, more commonly referred to as a rubber deck, was built ashore at Farnborough onto which aircraft were to fly a low, flat approach well above the aircraft’s stalling speed to pass just over the rubber deck with their arrester hook down. The obvious drawback was the inability of aircraft without wheels to move under their own power after landing either on a carrier deck or an airfield ashore. The idea had the additional merit that the airframes of fighters without undercarriages would be some 15% lighter than their conventional equivalents and this could be translated into higher performance. His concept was based on the logic that catapults and arrester wires, the other devices that allowed short take-offs and landings, were built into the carrier and not the aircraft. Mr Lewis Boddington, Head Scientist at the Naval Aircraft Department, NAD, at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, RAE, at Farnborough recommended transferring the pneumatic absorption of deck landing stresses from the aircraft to the carrier, in other words operating aircraft that had no undercarriages. For a while in 1947 it seemed to the Admiralty that if no practical solution could be found, the operation of jet fighters from carriers would only be possible in very small numbers. More flight deck space would be required for their arrested landings and, to make matters worse, the limited volume available in their thin wings would be unlikely to be able to accommodate the substantial undercarriages needed to absorb the impact velocities of deck landing at unprecedentedly high speeds. Scientists predicted that the next generation of fighters would have supersonic performance with thin, highly-swept wings designed for high performance at altitude and that such aircraft would have deck landing speeds twice that of piston-engined fighters. In 1945 deck landing trials with de Havilland Sea Vampire fighters exposed the limitations imposed by the slow acceleration rates of early types of jet engine and it became obvious that changes in both carrier technology and deck landing technique were needed. It has led the world in the design and development of the technologies that have allowed bigger and faster jets to take-off and land on their flight decks and continues to do so today. The Royal Navy designed and built the world’s first aircraft carrier, HMS Argus, in 1918. British aircraft carrier design that led the world
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