Rough landing in ABQ
 

I was in ABQ yesterday and saw an F-18 land pretty hard and over heard airport ops saying they bent the landing gear. Seems like it would have to be a pretty hard landing to do that to a carrier bird. Does that happen on carriers very often with all those hard landings in rough seas?

Sure it was a hornet? More likely an AF bird at ABQ.

But yeah I think you would almost break the pilot before you broke the gear on one of those.

Maybe an F-16 from the Guard unit there?

KABQ/Kirtland AFB is one of the most popular stopping points for east bound and west bound flights for Hornets. There is a hard landing code that will pop if certain criteria are met. It happens, but it certainly isn't a regular occurrence. I've never heard of 'bent' landing gear. though there is a feature of the landing gear called the 'Planning Link' that does bend or break sometimes and can cause loss of directional control on landing. There is a good YouTube video of an instance up in Canada where the pilot took a trap, but the initial swerve after engaging the wire led him to believe that he had lost it and he ended up ejecting before the aircraft came to a stop.

USMCFLYR

Naval Aviators...............

What's the average (desired) sink rate during a trap? ISTR from my god given couch potato gift (Wings channel - now Military), that it's 700 fpm?

16's are done at ABQ

That's the first thing I thought of. The Rube Goldberg landing gear system on the Hornet already looks bent.

Do the math for a three degree glide slope (can't remember what it actually is at the boat) at an average rate of closure and that sounds like it's in the ballpark, maybe a little less. I think fixed wing carrier aircraft are all rated for 1,800 FPM at "max trap" (MGLW), so a hard landing ashore (no rising deck) is hard to imagine.

Thanks! I was looking for the max FPM figure, comparing (as you did) ashore vs blue water. As far as the carrier GS, I found this from avitop.com:

The standard glidepath on the ship is 3.5 degrees. We sometimes increase the glidepath to 3.75 or 4.0 degrees in conditions of high wind so that the "perceived glidepath" remains relatively constant.

A Hornet's is about 850 +/- fpm IIRC.

USMCFLYR