Catapult Bridles

[seabat]

Forgot which book I was reading but early use of catapults on aircraft carriers utilized a cable bridle to launch aircraft.

The question I have is, what happened to the bridle after the plane was launched?

Did it get flung off the pointy end to rust at the bottom of the sea, did some poor swabbie have to run to the pointy end and lug the bridle back to the launch point, or did they just pile up at the pointy end until they had to be moved after the launch cycle.

I am guessing they were retrieved somehow as after a period at sea you would run out of bridles if they were not recycled.  I was just wondering what the process was, in particular for Vietnam era naval aircraft.

Thanks,

[Mace2004]

There were both versions, one's that stayed attached to the catapult shuttle and one's that went into the sea.  If you look at some aircraft carriers (pre CVN70 for the most part) you'll see that they had short ramps that stuck out from the bow and angled deck in front of the catapults.  These were bridle horns designed to put something for the bridle to hit vice letting them whip around the edge of the deck.  The bridle was dragged back to the start of the cat track when they retracted the shuttle.  Newer CVN's never had these installed, many of the old one's have been removed as we have no more bridle launched aircraft, they all use tow links attached to the nose gear.  The last aircraft that I remember still having a bridle launch system were some of the training aircraft (TA-4 and T-2C) and the EA-3D.  The airplanes had two hooks attached under the forward part of the wingroot.