A high-speed game of trust, cable, and hydraulics

Landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier is one of the hardest things a pilot can do. The runway is short. The target is moving. The ocean is doing its best to ruin your day. You have about three seconds to get it right or hit the throttle and try again.

The only reason any of it works is a system called arresting gear.

At the back of the flight deck, four steel cables stretch across the landing area. They sit there quietly, waiting to do the most important job on the ship. Each one is about the thickness of your forearm and built to stop a forty or fifty-thousand-pound jet in a space shorter than a Little League outfield.

Every Navy jet has a tailhook. It is exactly what it sounds like. A heavy-duty metal hook that hangs below the plane’s rear. As the jet touches down, the pilot tries to snag one of the cables with that hook. The sweet spot is the third wire. It gives the smoothest stop with the least stress on the aircraft. If the hook misses all four, the jet takes off again immediately in what is called a “bolter.” The pilot circles back and gives it another shot.

If the hook hits, everything happens fast. The wire gets yanked out and disappears into a complex system below the deck. Down there, massive pistons and hydraulic cylinders get to work. They convert the forward motion of the aircraft into fluid pressure and heat. In a little over two seconds, the plane goes from 150 miles per hour to zero. No brakes. No skidding. Just cable, hook, and physics.

The arresting gear is adjustable. The crew changes the hydraulic resistance depending on the speed and weight of each incoming jet. If they get it wrong, bad things happen. Too much force and the jet takes damage. Too little and it slides off the end of the carrier and into the water. It is a system that has to be perfect every time.

Even the landing itself is managed closely. One member of the flight deck crew is called the hook spotter. Their entire job is to watch the tailhook and make sure it is down before the plane attempts to land. The margin of error is small. The stakes are high. Everyone on deck knows it.

And this entire system? It did not come out of nowhere.

Before aircraft carriers became floating runways, landing on one was barely controlled chaos. Early systems used ropes, sandbags, and guesswork—whatever it took to keep a plane from rolling into the ocean.

As aircraft got faster and heavier in the 1930s, those setups stopped keeping up. That’s when Commander C. C. Mitchell, a Scottish mechanical engineer, stepped in and changed everything.

In 1931, Mitchell invented the first reliable hydraulic arresting gear system. It used fluid-filled pistons to absorb a plane’s momentum and bring it to a controlled stop. No metal-on-metal braking. No guesswork. Just a system that worked consistently.

The Navy quickly adopted and improved on it. By the mid-30s, they were already upgrading to Mk 2 and Mk 3 systems. These formed the foundation for the Mk 7 arresting gear, which would serve for decades. Even today, modern systems are just high-tech descendants of what Mitchell started.

He never made headlines, but every safe carrier landing since owes something to his design.

Quiet engineer. Big legacy. Solid dude.

From the outside, she looks like one giant copper sculpture. But inside, she’s basically a massive, spiraling steel skeleton with thin copper skin stretched over it like a giant jacket. Here’s the part that blows people’s minds: the copper shell is only 3/32 of an inch thick. That’s less than two pennies stacked together.

She’s been standing in wind, rain, and salty sea air since 1886… with skin as thin as a coin.