Originally Posted by Astro14
My understanding is that "Magic Carpet" is being used to dramatically reduce training costs.
Since it makes carrier landings so much simpler, then the Navy doesn't need to spend the money on practice landings, which took about 20% of the flying dollars, both at sea and on land in preparation for going to sea.
So, you're right, Bill, the development of the skills needed to fly aboard without this system will not take place. The technology makes it no longer "necessary" to be able to manually fly the airplane aboard the "old-fashioned" way; with line-up, pitch, power, and AOA control.
The CNO (Chief of Naval Operations, top Admiral in the Navy) that approved this is a Submariner. He viewed this as a huge money-saving development. The new CNO (nominated yesterday) is a P-3 guy, so you cannot expect any advocacy for pilot skills from him (sorry, Mouth, but he's a land-based guy, never understood the CV environment).
I am deeply concerned about the direction Naval Aviation is taking with the Magic Carpet. The stick and rudder precision that Navy pilots are known for will no longer be taught, developed, or needed...
Until the technology goes south.
And in that moment, when stick and rudder skills are needed, they won't exist.
So, maybe all those dollars saved across hundred of pilots will pay for the carnage on the flight deck, or the loss of the airplane when the pilot has to eject because they're unable to land...
Perhaps that's deemed "acceptable risk" by the top leadership.
The 20% metric is an interesting one. It's relatively small, I would have assumed that carrier ops training to stay sharp would be a more significant fraction, given its criticality. I'd have also thought that every carrier landing is a chance to train for the worst.
The one thing that the recently departed CNO would understand is risk acceptance and nested risks. The NR philosophy is all about how many steps to a credible event. I would expect that the aviation community wouldn't be that far behind in redundancy and numbers of failures that would have to occur to hit a certain condition.
Sure, I understand that the controls can be hacked, fail, or take battle damage. The first one is a changing threat, the second is a reliability issue that I'd assume would be the case in an FBW platform, relative to actuation capabilities. I would think that the third would be contingent upon design precepts, such that if the damage got to the controls, the platform wouldn't be able to fly.
So I'd think that a product like this would make pilots lives easier. Remember that S2F is an ONR program that is intended to rapidly provide tech based upon Navy/USMC direct input. This isn't the type of thing where a bureaucrat or contractor had a good idea that they just had to sell. They are asking for this. The policy and doctrine to keep training for contingencies, every time there isn't, seems to me to be a different matter, what's stopping them?