On December 5, a Russian Su-33 fighter jet skidded off the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean while landing. On November 14, a MiG-29K fighter bomber crashed while landing on the carrier’s flight deck. The two mishaps raised a barrage of often unjustified criticism both in Russia and abroad.
The Times joined in this chorus of criticism quoting Igor Sutyagin, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, as saying that “Only a limited number of Russian pilots have the required level of training to take-off or land on a carrier.”
The German weekly newsmagazine Stern voiced a dissenting note, though, writing that the Admiral Kuznetsov still had upstaged the “glory of the US Navy” – the latest stealth destroyer USS Zumwalt, which had suffered an embarrassing breakdown in the Panama Canal and had been escorted through by tugboats.
Is the Admiral Kuznetsov really as bad as some commentators claim and what about the very same problems Western aircraft carriers have had to grapple with in the past? US statistics Even though the US Navy has been running short of carriers in the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East, it still has nearly a dozen such ships now afloat and an equally impressive number of mishaps too.
At the time, Forrestal was engaged in combat operations in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War. The ship survived, but with damage exceeding US$72 million (equivalent to $512 million today).
The US Navy has suffered over 100 major incidents over the past 50 years. With a list of tragic mishaps that long, the Americans have no right to badmouth Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov, which has only lost three planes in 11 years and has suffered no casualties.
The lessons from the recent incidents with the Admiral Kuznetsov have been learned. Pilot training will improve, technical problems will be attended to and the carrier’s landing system upgraded.
Read more: https://sputniknews.com/russia/201612091048350821-russia-carrier-mishaps/