Page 21 - Nov2019

Those simmers not familiar with aircraft landings, will have
immense difficulty landing on Nimitz because the special
situation for the 'carrier landing' does not offer enough
time to get the aeroplane into a stable situation. Why oh
why if you use Shift+4, does it stupidly give you a front
view? A workaround for some of these problems is to take
off from a shore based strip and then find the carrier. X-
Plane is pretty smart, in that it will always put Nimitz
somewhere near to your start position (you can open the
map to find it). If you want to do a water start for a
seaplane (in the UK we seem to get Loch Lomond as our
default), you could equally take off from Southampton
airport, land in Portsmouth Harbour and then save it as a
.sit file.
Landing on a carrier involves a moving runway at roughly
20 kts, and if the carrier is heading into a 15 kt headwind,
we get 35 kts. If our jet has a stall speed of maybe 160 kts,
we can hit the deck at around a relative 105 kts
groundspeed. In a high sea the deck of the Nimitz may pitch

through a range of more than 50 feet, so if we are on
The build of this carrier is exceptionally good, possibly as
approach and the rear deck is down, we may overshoot the good as Nimitz. It is however, rather let down by some
arrestor wires, and likewise, if it is pitched up, we may well
problems which probably have more to do with the
slam into the stern. Not sure if there is any truth to this, but
limitations within X-Plane, rather than the skills of the
apparently someone mentioned that the US Navy could talented author. For starters, the bow wave is too far
never have carried out the Falklands operation as they
forward, and the stern wave cuts off too sharply. In my
would have been unable to fly high speed jets in heavy sea
opinion, it should be staggered and broken up a bit. It also
states; whereas VTOL planes (used by the RAF), are more requires a Cat Shot for take off, but Queen Elizabeth will
adaptable - that is not to say it is easier however. Anyway,
never have one, and if you load the 'Cat Shot' situation,
whether this is old wives gossip, I cannot possibly comment
your plane is rudely dumped into the sea.
further.
Be careful of possible wind effect from the bridge; a good
skipper will hold the ship dead into the wind, but it may

shear. However I am unsure if .obj files for ships have any
actually simulated aerodynamic value; it may be just a
Conclusions
spook from a wobbly hand.
The default carrier, Nimitz, provides a realistic platform for
Apart from Nimitz and Perry, there are a few other
USN operations. However, since all ops are built on that
alternative carriers (freeware), in which to try your hand at
default model, Laminar really ought to improve carrier
landings:
handling. With that in mind, here are some ideas about
Queen Elizabeth, a new build recently published by MRL: how they could possibly go about it.
hms_queen_elizabeth.zip
1. Provide a naval operations menu option, complete with a
One of my own: future_royal_navy.zip
drop down list of carrier choice.
My analysis makes me think that the ramp start for the cat
shot is set close to the bow wave, so ultimately only 2. Provide carrier builders with a framework of rules, so
dimensioned for Nimitz (if Laminar have features to fix this, they can put it into something like a .prefs file.
they should publish them). I suspect if MRL set his ship up
so the bow wave was at the stern, it may go some way to
fixing this issue - at the expense of the stern wave being a
long way back.