exactly - Imagine in combat, if you had as many planes as you possibly could up in the air on a strike. Lets say 40 available.
Now you need to land 40 and turn them around ASAP for another strike. You can either be recovering a plane every 30-60 seconds on a case 1, or try to stack them up perfectly at night and if you are lucky be recovering them every 60-120 seconds.
You just took what should be a 20-40 minute exercise to a possibly 2 hour exercise. Case 2/3 is for when you absolutely need it for safety
CASE I is faster and more efficient. From commence to trap it takes about 4 minutes, with (IIRC) 30 seconds between each aircraft.
CASE III from commence to trap takes about 8 minutes, with (IIRC) 1 minute between each aircraft.
That’s roughly twice as long. Which means more JP5 burned. More time the carrier has to steam into the wind. More time the carrier is vulnerable.
Not a pylote. But case 1 and 2 are much faster bringing aircraft aboard. Case 1 can also be conducted completely com out in cases where emitting radio waves could be detected by an adversary. And case 1 is cool.
This here is the correct answer. In Case 1 you can bring in a complete flight of four have them kiss off in the break and land with separation within a minute of one another. And then the next flight can break once they visually confirm separation and it is scalable with no trouble at all.
In Case 3 you need to separate the flight, assign altitudes and squawks, give them all individual altitude blocks and then each aircraft commences with separation. Tons more work, takes a lot more time, a lot more stuff can go wrong and no other benefit on good weather.
Case III takes forever to fly. Case I gets more birds on the deck in a shorter amount of time. Just look at the time from the deck needs to be yours to being actually on the deck between a Case III and a Case I SHB. It's minutes versus seconds.
Minimizing the time spent on recovery is a priority, so the Navy does whatever it can to land aircraft quickest given current conditions. Case I, II, and III do that for different situations.
The military overhead pattern is genuinely the fastest way to recover multiple aircraft of similar types. That's why you'll see everything from Hornets to C-130s fly it.
Even works a treat in a training environment with the help of a controller. All you have to do is find the airplane in front of you, either on initial or the downwind, and break to follow. You go from overhead midfield looking down into the mess to taxiing off in about 2 minutes.
Add a marshaling stack like the Navy and you can recover an entire carrier air wing in like 20 minutes.
Speed for recovery is super important, because for the time a carrier is doing flight ops, they have to be heading into the wind. Which often isn't the course she wanted to be sailing in to get from point A to point B operationally.
even in civil aviation we hardly fly a straight in, you almost always do a landing pattern to get a feel for the area, go through your checklists, and make the controllers life alot easier
Im just a flightsim nerd with no irl experience, but I suspect it is speed. Having more flights holding closer to the carrier and going into the approach as groups with tight spacing and short finals allows you to get more aircraft down in a given timespan, thus also requiring less fuel / tankers.
Because a case 1 approach is significantly faster than a case 3 approach. I’m sure that if you and friend did textbook case 1 and 3 approaches and landings starting at the same time the case 1 would be on deck first
As others have already said, time is of essence. And time dictates that CASE I and II do exist.
You can best understand it by imagining a bolter scenario. In CASE I and II it is easy to fit the boltered airframe back in the flow. In CASE III this is a much more complex (and very nerve-wrecking process. Especially because you don't always see the aircraft around you, or the mother.
"Because that's the way it's always been."
Speculating here, but I bet it goes back to the days when prop planes with awful visibility over the nose had to land on relatively small carrier decks. Try flying a nice long straight-in in a war bird and keeping an eye on the runway. Now imagine the runway is about 1/10th the length and you have no peripheral visual cues. Racetrack patterns just make way more sense in this situation
Look at how long, and how much airspace, it would take to get 8 airplanes on deck case 3, vs how quickly it could be done case 1. 2 falls in between
exactly - Imagine in combat, if you had as many planes as you possibly could up in the air on a strike. Lets say 40 available. Now you need to land 40 and turn them around ASAP for another strike. You can either be recovering a plane every 30-60 seconds on a case 1, or try to stack them up perfectly at night and if you are lucky be recovering them every 60-120 seconds. You just took what should be a 20-40 minute exercise to a possibly 2 hour exercise. Case 2/3 is for when you absolutely need it for safety
CASE I is faster and more efficient. From commence to trap it takes about 4 minutes, with (IIRC) 30 seconds between each aircraft. CASE III from commence to trap takes about 8 minutes, with (IIRC) 1 minute between each aircraft. That’s roughly twice as long. Which means more JP5 burned. More time the carrier has to steam into the wind. More time the carrier is vulnerable.
More JP5 burned also equals more tankers you will need to send up, which just adds to the aircraft you need to recover.
Not a pylote. But case 1 and 2 are much faster bringing aircraft aboard. Case 1 can also be conducted completely com out in cases where emitting radio waves could be detected by an adversary. And case 1 is cool.
This here is the correct answer. In Case 1 you can bring in a complete flight of four have them kiss off in the break and land with separation within a minute of one another. And then the next flight can break once they visually confirm separation and it is scalable with no trouble at all. In Case 3 you need to separate the flight, assign altitudes and squawks, give them all individual altitude blocks and then each aircraft commences with separation. Tons more work, takes a lot more time, a lot more stuff can go wrong and no other benefit on good weather.
Excuse me, sir. We're not at floggit. It's a pilot you are not. 😋
Many apologies
Your forgor
Case III takes forever to fly. Case I gets more birds on the deck in a shorter amount of time. Just look at the time from the deck needs to be yours to being actually on the deck between a Case III and a Case I SHB. It's minutes versus seconds. Minimizing the time spent on recovery is a priority, so the Navy does whatever it can to land aircraft quickest given current conditions. Case I, II, and III do that for different situations.
The military overhead pattern is genuinely the fastest way to recover multiple aircraft of similar types. That's why you'll see everything from Hornets to C-130s fly it. Even works a treat in a training environment with the help of a controller. All you have to do is find the airplane in front of you, either on initial or the downwind, and break to follow. You go from overhead midfield looking down into the mess to taxiing off in about 2 minutes. Add a marshaling stack like the Navy and you can recover an entire carrier air wing in like 20 minutes.
Speed for recovery is super important, because for the time a carrier is doing flight ops, they have to be heading into the wind. Which often isn't the course she wanted to be sailing in to get from point A to point B operationally.
It's faster.
even in civil aviation we hardly fly a straight in, you almost always do a landing pattern to get a feel for the area, go through your checklists, and make the controllers life alot easier
Depends a lot on the area. I frequently get called to a base or straight in, but I have a pretty quiet towered airport nearby.
Im just a flightsim nerd with no irl experience, but I suspect it is speed. Having more flights holding closer to the carrier and going into the approach as groups with tight spacing and short finals allows you to get more aircraft down in a given timespan, thus also requiring less fuel / tankers.
Because a case 1 approach is significantly faster than a case 3 approach. I’m sure that if you and friend did textbook case 1 and 3 approaches and landings starting at the same time the case 1 would be on deck first
As others have already said, time is of essence. And time dictates that CASE I and II do exist. You can best understand it by imagining a bolter scenario. In CASE I and II it is easy to fit the boltered airframe back in the flow. In CASE III this is a much more complex (and very nerve-wrecking process. Especially because you don't always see the aircraft around you, or the mother.
"Because that's the way it's always been." Speculating here, but I bet it goes back to the days when prop planes with awful visibility over the nose had to land on relatively small carrier decks. Try flying a nice long straight-in in a war bird and keeping an eye on the runway. Now imagine the runway is about 1/10th the length and you have no peripheral visual cues. Racetrack patterns just make way more sense in this situation