The top speed (in knots) of a non planing boat is 1.34 * square root (length). Going faster it will start to climb on it’s bow wave. It will plane. I’m sure a hangar ship don’t plane 
For instance, according to Wikipedia the waterline length of USS George H.W. Bush is 1040 feet. The top speed is 43.2 knots (if it has the engine power, which is probably has).
Planing is very similar to going faster than the speed of sound in air, only the speed of the bow wave is not a constant, but proportional to the square root of the waterline length. Some extreme narrow boats can go faster than this max speed (without planing), like competition kayaks and competition rowing boats. Going faster, the physics changes character completely. It is no longer the buoyancy that keeps the boat afloat, but hydrodynamic forces.
First of all great thread everybody.
@silvaire
That’s a neat video. Imagine circling overhead a carrier with your wife and 5 kids aboard. The guy sure knew how to fly.
We now all know the first step is to ditch a note wrapped pistol on deck, then wait for the jets and helis to be pushed overboard.
Seriously, he couldn’t radio them as he had no headset.
https://www.historynet.com/maj-buang-lys-daring-feat-to-save-his-family.htm
There was a mission in Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition where you had a total engine failure (in a C208, IIRC) over the pacific and a carrier happened to be nearby, which you had to emergency-land on to fulfill the objectives. IIRC I made it on the third try.
It has also been a mission in sub logic flight simulator back in the 80ies….
In reality it is hard to imagine that the Americans, French, Brits, Russians or Chinese would even let you get close to damaging their flight deck by doing a crash landing on it.
I think it would depend.on the state of readiness of the carrier at the time.
Somewhere on You Tube you will find footage of a WW2 Mosquito landing on a carrier.So size of runway would not be a problem for most light GA
But as a member of our club, who flies from a carrier pointed out, if they were readying a “squadron”(my translation) for a mission, there would not be any room to land. There have been occasions where more than one carrier was in operation at a distance but in the same field of operation where perfectly good aircraft have had to be pushed over the side to accept incoming Mayday traffic.
The other factor would be how a GA pilot would cope with a runway pitching up and down, on occasions quite a distance between top and bottom of the swell.
A C130 landed on a carrier many many years ago.
LeSving wrote:
The top speed (in knots) of a non planing boat is 1.34 * square root (length). Going faster it will start to climb on it’s bow wave. It will plane. I’m sure a hangar ship don’t planeFor instance, according to Wikipedia the waterline length of USS George H.W. Bush is 1040 feet. The top speed is 43.2 knots (if it has the engine power, which is probably has).
Planing is very similar to going faster than the speed of sound in air, only the speed of the bow wave is not a constant, but proportional to the square root of the waterline length. Some extreme narrow boats can go faster than this max speed (without planing), like competition kayaks and competition rowing boats. Going faster, the physics changes character completely. It is no longer the buoyancy that keeps the boat afloat, but hydrodynamic forces.
Most reasonably modern vessels are semi-displacement and the hull speed formula has little practical relevance.
For instance, it calculates the maximum speed of a 36ft sailing yacht as 8.04 knots, and I know from personal experience that such a craft can sail at least a few knots faster. I believe I’ve had 9.5 knots out of a 32 footer on a close reach, and according to the hull speed formula it should only be able to do 7.5.
dublinpilot wrote:
We’re the heli’s out of fuel? If not then why not take off while waiting on the major to land then return when he was down?
Indeed – that seems bonkers. He only asked for them to be moved around a bit, so were there so many that a clear run could not possibly be created? One assumes there is the ability to move them around the flight deck without them having to power up, but perhaps not. And indeed, if fuel and pilots are available, then why not just fly a short distance away while he lands? Perhaps there were few/no heli pilots on board?
In the case of the Bird Dog landing incident there were so many helicopters delivering people to the ship in the evacuation that there would not have been room for all of them in any case, and some aircraft had to go overboard. Link
I spent 25 years living in a neighborhood significantly populated by these people, plus those that got out later, and all their descendants. There are a lot of them. There are several nice stories on line about the subsequent lives of the family that landed in the Bird Dog. Pilot and ship’s captain both shown in this more recent photo.
A great many more aircraft were left behind on shore in 1975, and for example if you go to the Kbely museum in Prague there is an American F-5 fighter that flew on for a while but was later shipped to then-Czechoslovakia to be examined by the Warsaw Pact industry. I’m easily amused 
but found that interesting when visiting.
Landing on a moving target is quite different than landing on a stationary one. I think in later times there was a Ryan Navion who landed on a larger carrier somewhere over the pacific near California at some stage and they put up the crash barrier, which obviously ruined the engine and prop at least.
It should be feasible but not easy. I guess if you have flown with the meatball system before it would help. But engine out, I would strongly think ditching near the ship would be the safer option. If you look at carrier ops, landing planes there are on quite a bit of power and actually never cut the power until after the catch. Actually, they do go to full power on touch down in case they miss the wire.
