Photo: U.S. Navy
For most civilians, the challenges of landing an aircraft on a carrier at sea are great unknowns. We got some semblance of an idea on how that is thanks to the countless documentaries out there and movies like Top Gun, but we’ll never truly understand what it takes.
From the same documentaries and movies, we got the notion that pilots use both instruments and their heavily-trained intuition to land on a ship. Up to this point, though, mostly intuition, combined with experience, was what helped pilots slam on the deck of a ship at just the right moment to be trapped by a wire and brought to a stop.
For some of these pilots, that might change in the near future. Since 2008, the U.S. Navy has been working on something called Joint Precision Approach and Landing System. JPALS, for short, is a system that integrates the benefits of global positioning with the shipboard air traffic control and landing system architectures in an attempt to guide a plane down “with pinpoint approach and landings on nuclear aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships.”
It’s been a long time since work on this system began. It was only at the beginning of May 2021 that the Navy declared initial operational capability for JPALS, one year ahead of the project's planned completion.
The announcement was made this week and came after a series of tests performed with F-35C fighter planes starting in 2016. Now it is supposedly ready to safely bring down on the decks of floating ships fast-moving fighter jets.
The Navy did not announce a deployment calendar for the JPALS yet, but does say it plans on expanding the reach of the system beyond the F-35s and even into drone territory. The military branch’s top brass set their sights on the MQ-25A Stingray operating out of nuclear aircraft carriers.
For some of these pilots, that might change in the near future. Since 2008, the U.S. Navy has been working on something called Joint Precision Approach and Landing System. JPALS, for short, is a system that integrates the benefits of global positioning with the shipboard air traffic control and landing system architectures in an attempt to guide a plane down “with pinpoint approach and landings on nuclear aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships.”
It’s been a long time since work on this system began. It was only at the beginning of May 2021 that the Navy declared initial operational capability for JPALS, one year ahead of the project's planned completion.
The announcement was made this week and came after a series of tests performed with F-35C fighter planes starting in 2016. Now it is supposedly ready to safely bring down on the decks of floating ships fast-moving fighter jets.
The Navy did not announce a deployment calendar for the JPALS yet, but does say it plans on expanding the reach of the system beyond the F-35s and even into drone territory. The military branch’s top brass set their sights on the MQ-25A Stingray operating out of nuclear aircraft carriers.
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