Classic British Flight Sim

Me too I was on Hermes for a couple of months loan draft (my first trip to sea) and it certainly didn't feel 'small' onboard but compared to Ark IV and Eagle and just about ANY of the U.S. carriers.. it was a tiddler. Shame fixed wing ops had finished by then

ATB
DaveB

For the straight deck carriers landing aircraft would taxi forward of the two nets abeam the island, once clear these would be raised so that if the next aircraft missed the wires it'd be stopped by the nets rather than rows of parked aircraft. The nets drop down and back up in a few seconds. Once the aircraft were forward of the net the wings could be folded and the engine shut down in relative leisure with the chockheads* packing them in like sardines. An exception to this rule was Furious which had no net so each aircraft had to go down the forward lift before the next landed, this meant the fighters generally landed first as they could fit on the lift without having to fold the wings, then the Barracuda/Swordfish/Whatever landed on at a much slower rate.

Note later in the war most of the aircraft would stay on the flight deck unless they needed maintenance as it allowed a lot more to be embarked.

With the landing speed of jet aircraft, and the mass involved, hitting the net would probably write off the aircraft so the angled deck allowed the pilot another go at getting onboard. It would still be pretty difficult to do concurrent launch and recovery as even on the Nimitz class carriers the recovering aircraft get parked where the bow catapults are, and generally aircraft queuing for launch are on the recovery area. For instance if you look at the Phantom operating Ark Royal both catapults impinge on the landing area and I think on the Nimitz the port bow cat jet blast deflector intrudes into the area that's kept clear for recovery. Consequently the pattern would tend to be launch one wave of aircraft then recover the previous one.


*Deck handlers.