That's why SOP is to slam the throttles to max whether you snag the cable or not! Notice in this video that some of the planes AFTERBURNERS are lit when they come to a halt.
Probably, Hawkeyes don't have AB's to stand on and it was pretty obvious they were just below V2min when they left the flight deck. Dutch's point is spot on. Engines to max when they grab the wire. Gosh, it really makes me appreciate those 8,000 foot and longer runways we had....
There was an old video I was looking for of a Hawkeye that came in and caught the wire but took off again... The arresting cable stopped the plane when it was in midair about ten or fifteen feet above the deck, and it basically FELL straight down onto the deck and did a hella job on it's main landing gear! Something else I was looking at in the video was the elevator tail planes on the aircraft coming to a stop. In a "Missed Wire" scenario, you want to be ready for a different angle of attack or incidence when leaving the deck at low speed and full power - you can plainly see the pilots hand is on the flight controls full-time.
I bet it was close - and if you go in right in front of the ship (one damned good reason landings are done diagonally across the deck!!!) the ship would plow right over the plane and crew. The four screws under the ship are the biggest "CUISINARTS" anybody can imagine - they create a great deal of suction in front of them along the sides of the hull.
I'm willing to bet that the corrosion control shop were a bunch of real happy people. Most likely had MAFs for both the interior crew stations as well as the exterior surfaces of the aircraft....outside the normal PM schedule. After having apparently upset the Mainland Chinese one morning, we were returning to SungShan AB in Taipei at VMax and minimum altitude. We were low enough that we were throwing up a wake with the props....really impressed the 7th Fleet intelligence officer we had on board. Corrosion Control crew back at Cubi a few days later......not so impressed.
One look at the props also told me it was the latest and greatest version of the E-2. The old version had much the same props as a C-130 Hercules, the new six blade props were a nightmare to balance, and they were working on the maintenance classes for that at NAMTRAU (used to be NAMTRAGRUDET) when I was there in 2000. That was the bird I was a radar transmitter tech and instructor for - the transmitter takes up a quarter of the fuselage from the copilots seat back to the operators space on the starboard side. A 'normal' transmitter puts out 1,000,000 watts (ONE MILLION - think about that) of energy, and I've seen at least one that put out double that installed in a test bench. ~The landing gear has an interlock switch that will not allow it to transmit on deck. *NOTE: The final amplifier weighs over 250 pounds, for those of you into amateur radio. It's a MASSIVE triode mated to an equally huge pentode pre-driver. The filament for the triode is heated with a dedicated 800 amp power supply of it's own. Add to that the multi-color displays at the operators stations, the receiver group, and the usual assortment of comnav and other electronics and what you have is an AIMD officers next big blood pressure spike in the making... The wave guides and dome would probably be completely trashed. We're talking NARF project, if it hit the water. I've seen what happens when AIMD Emergency Corrosion Control is activated - there was a YDP (Young Dumb Punk) on one of the ships I served on that thought it would be funny to trigger the hangar bay one "A Triple F" system when he staggered back from a night on the town, and a few cockpits were open. EVERYTHING in the cockpits, or that any of the AFFF got on had to be stripped out and CC done on all of it ASAFP!!! Maintenance Control essentially got BOMBED with vids/mafs ~Like they weren't busy enough... * There was a time when I was TAD to Maintenance Control and was in charge of both the combined IMRL, and inducting all inbound gear to the AIMD aboard USS Nimitz. I still don't use all of my fingers to type, but I can do it fast anyway. They were still using Windows 3.0 back then. In fact - I remember when all vids/mafs were on paper, and then it went to a computer system with orange Hercules graphics on a black screen. The next stage (during the nineties) was to a DOS 6.0 format. At every stage, there were expert programs that would reject incorrect maintenance codes if you tried to enter the wrong thing. The QA data analysts had their final say when VIDS/MAFS began to be done on computer... You couldn't get away with "F 070" anymore (F= Unscheduled Maintenance. 070 = BROKEN...)
