The British Carrier Strike Fleet. David Hobbs
a higher flashpoint than avgas which could be stored in integral hull tanks like fuel oil, allowing much greater quantities to be stowed in carriers. That said, jet fuel was only refined in the USA at the time and had to be purchased with scarce dollars. Costs dropped, however, after the emergence of civilian aircraft, such the de Havilland Comet, when aviation turbine fuel began to be refined in the UK.
For a while in 1946–7 it seemed that if no radical solution was forthcoming the operation of jet fighters would only be possible in very small numbers. One solution that was taken very seriously came from Mr Lewis Boddington, the Head Scientist at the new Naval Aircraft Department (NAD), at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. He proposed transferring the pneumatic absorption of the deck landing from the aircraft to the carrier, in other words operating aircraft without undercarriages. Although extreme, his idea 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. It had the additional merit that undercarriage-less fighters would be some 15 per cent lighter than their conventional equivalents and this could be translated into higher performance. 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 Admiralty was sufficiently concerned about the problem that it devoted money, manpower and resources to evaluate the concept at the height of the post-war economic and manpower crisis.9
With the possibility that landing speeds up to 135 knots might be necessary, downwind carrier approaches were flown by Sea Vampires to evaluate the problems of deck landing control officers (DCLOs) and a flexible deck, more commonly referred to as a rubber deck, was built ashore at RAE Farnborough. Boddington proposed that aircraft flew a low, flat approach well above stalling speed to pass just over the rubber deck with the hook down. 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. Shore trials were flown by Lieutenant Commander Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown DSC AFC RN who flew a modified Vampire prototype, TG 286, and several Sea Vampire F 21s. The latter had a conventional undercarriage but were built with a strengthened fuselage capable of withstanding the impact of wheels-up landings. Judging the right height over the rubber deck which was raised about 2ft above the surrounding surface was not easy and both TG 286 and the rubber deck were damaged in one approach that dropped too low but the trials were generally sufficiently successful to move forward to sea trials.
In 1948 Warrior, which had recently returned to Portsmouth from loan service with the RCN, was fitted with a rubber deck made out of hosepipes laid athwart-ships over the conventional flight deck between the two centreline lifts; they were filled with compressed air and covered by a rubber membrane on which the aircraft landed. The surface was lubricated for landings by hosing fresh water onto it. A single USN Mark 4 arrester gear was fitted over the rubber deck with the actuating pistons situated fore and aft alongside it. It had a maximum pull-out of only 160ft which meant that a high minimum wind over the deck was required for every recovery. Warrior’s first rubber deck trials took place in November 1948 and the first landing was carried out by Lieutenant Commander Brown in TG 286 at an indicated air speed of 96 knots into a 35-knot wind over the deck which gave an entry speed into the wire of 61 knots. Once landed, the aircraft was lifted by ‘Jumbo’ the mobile crane so that its undercarriage could be lowered and it could then be manoeuvred on the conventional area of flight deck forward of the rubber deck as normal. From there it carried out a free take-off and returned to RNAS Lee-on-Solent where the trials aircraft were based. All subsequent landings were flown by Sea Vampire F21s which were heavier and capable of being launched by catapult. A DLCO, or ‘batsman’ as he was more commonly known, was positioned on the flight deck aft to monitor approaches and wave aircraft off if they appeared to go low. He did not give a ‘cut’ signal since the aircraft was intended to ‘fly through’ the wire. There were problems on two occasions when the arrester wire struck the aircraft’s booms which forced it out of the hook. In both cases the aircraft made contact with the deck and slid along it but the application of full power allowed them to climb away safely.
Subsequent trials included landings at higher entry speeds with retardations measured between 1.8 and 3.1g and deliberate off-centre landings. On 25 November 1948 Sea Vampire VT 805 was launched by Warrior’s BH 3 hydraulic catapult, the first time the RN had launched a jet-propelled aircraft with a nose-wheel undercarriage from one of its aircraft carriers. Further trials were carried out in March 1949; this time with two USN Mark 4 arresting gears mounted in tandem with the wire carried around the moving crossheads of both allowing a pull-out of 290ft and an entry speed up to 120 knots. Five pilots with varying degrees of experience flew the aircraft this time in addition to Lieutenant Commander Brown. The USN sent observers to witness these trials including representatives of the Military Requirements, Ship’s Installation Division and the Naval Air Material Center. As late as November 1952 a classified report by these agencies spoke optimistically about the project10 but by then it was really moribund.
A number of safe landings had demonstrated the ability of undercarriage-less aircraft to land on a flexible deck but they also demonstrated the fundamental flaw in the concept quite clearly. Conventional landings by wheeled aircraft onto straight-deck carriers averaged about two per minute at the time. At closing speeds of about 60 knots this meant that as the first aircraft took a wire, the second should be turning finals 1000 yards astern. Taking this distance as an acceptable minimum, Boddington argued that aircraft with a closing speed of 110 knots should be able to recover, theoretically, at the rate of one every 16 seconds, about four per minute. Assuming that the wave-off signal for a deck that was not yet clear was left until the following aircraft was in to 200 yards, this allowed 12 seconds to clear the rubber deck after each landing. The reality was that it took five minutes to clear each aircraft off Warrior’s rubber deck, lifting them by crane while their under-carriages were pumped down.11 Given the number of aircraft embarked, even in the light fleet carriers, a landing interval of five minutes was never going to be acceptable and NAD produced a number of ingenious ideas to overcome the problem but none was ever likely to be a practical success at sea. They included a hydraulically-lowered ramp forward of the rubber deck down which the aircraft could be hauled by a wire, quickly attached to a ring on its nose by an aircraft handler who ran out to it as it stopped. After the recovery the ramp would be raised to form part of the flight deck again. Another proposal was a system of wires to pull aircraft onto side lifts which would strike them down into the hangar rapidly. The least unlikely idea was to split the deck with a nylon barrier; as aircraft slithered to a halt a handler would attach a wire cable to the nose, the barrier would be lowered and the aircraft pulled quickly forward and the barrier raised in the style of conventional straight-deck operations. Once in Fly 1, the jumbled mass of aircraft on their bellies could be sorted out in slower time, lifted by crane on to trollies and re-spotted, but this would have taken a long time. The faster recovery time would have been achieved at the expense of a very slow re-spot that would still have degraded a carrier’s ability to generate sorties.
The problem with the ‘rubber’ deck and undercarriage-less aircraft is shown clearly here. Once the aircraft had come to rest, it had to be hauled onto the trolley in the foreground by a cable attached to a winch. To make matters worse, the trolley had no brakes, which made it difficult for handlers to manoeuvre. In the time it took to clear this aircraft from the landing area as many as ten conventional fighters could have landed-on and taxied into Fly 1. (Author’s collection)
The idea of separating launch and recovery decks was the best thing to emerge from this spate of design concepts. The idea of canting the landing deck to port of the ship’s centreline so that so that aircraft could be pulled off it into Fly 2 led directly to the brilliantly simple idea of the angled deck. This was a period of innovative thought like none that had gone before it and bright ideas continued with the result that the rubber deck was not finally abandoned until 1954. Some major problems were never addressed, among them the need to have rubber ‘mats’ available at airfields throughout the world where carrier-borne aircraft might have to divert. Another was the problem of landing undercarriage-less aircraft with pylons fitted with unexpended weapons or drop tanks which could