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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Angled flight decks
Message-ID: <1990Dec15.013027.14681@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 15 Dec 90 01:30:27 GMT
References: <1990Dec13.033642.19678@cbnews.att.com>
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>From: jvz@ccird1.cci.com (John V. Zambito)
>the author says runways have been angled ever since the British
>did research and found them to be better than straight ones. Does
>anybody have any more information. It seems that a pilot would want his 
>flight path parallel with the direction of the ship.

Other things being equal, yes.  But other things are not equal.  Carriers
are generally not big enough to have a clear runway running the full length
of the deck *and* parking for all the aircraft simultaneously.  This means
that if your runway runs straight fore and aft, it *ends* at a crash barrier
of some kind, with parked aircraft ahead of the barrier.  The angled deck,
on the other hand, ends over water, so if you overshoot the arresting cables,
you just pour on the coal, pull up, and go around for another try.  The minor
hassle of having to make a landing at an angle is insignificant compared to
the requirement for a zero-defects landing.
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry