Hoping someone can answer this question:

I have found a photo of the USS Hornet's flightdeck:



There would appear to be arrester wires along the entire flightdeck. Why was this deemed necessary?

Cheers,
Julian

Hi Julian

As far as I remember US Carriers of this period were designed to enable planes landing when the ship was going astern. They had quite high reverse speeds to enable this. There are photos of tests in http://www.navsource.org/
Not sure about the tactical purpose of this, but they also had catapults to launch planes directly from the hangar deck

Greetings from Shanghai

Hi Tom,
sounds plausable. I noticed on the later carriers they dropped the forward arrester wires so it probably wasn't the best of ideas.
Cheers,
Julian

It's not that it was the best of ideas, more that the Navy wanted to use the weight for other things, such as anti0aircraft guns. The forward arresting gear and hangar deck catapult were originally conceived partially for damaged flight decks - if the deck was damaged aft, just reverse the ship and land them over the bow.

It worked, but wasn't used operationally that much. Generally the carriers were operating in groups, so if one deck was fouled, they could land on another one. There was a real need for more anti-aircraft guns, radars, etc., so away went the forward arresting gear, as well as a lot of other stuff.

Thank you Tracy, the final piece of the jig-saw puzzle.
cheers,