There are few jobs that are more dangerous than landing a plane on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Often referred to as “controlled crashes,” every successful landing is not only graded, but lauded. Carrier landing milestone for individual pilots are celebrated with patches on their flight jackets, while the carriers themselves will exult these achievements with a ceremony often involving the cutting of a monumental-size cake.
More than 342,000 successful carrier landings were made on the USS Midway (CV-41) over the course of its nearly 50-year career. Each of those 1,000th landing records were commemorated with a brass plate engraved with the landing number, the date and the pilot’s name. The plates were then anchored to large brass plaques, usually 30 plates to a plaque.
The plaques were part of a small number of artifacts from the Midway’s history that were stored in a hangar at Naval Air Station North Island following the ship’s decommissioning in 1992. The plaques were given to Midway when it returned to San Diego and opened as a museum in 2004.
“The Midway library has been storing the eleven heavy brass plaques commemorating more than 300 of the 1000 landing milestones on board the ship,” said Dave Hanson, Midway’s curator. “For years, the librarians have been researching the information needed to replicate the missing plates on some of the plaques. We are now ready to move forward with replacing the ones that are missing, and have joined forces with the ship restoration team to get it done.”
Over the past 20 years, a countless number of museum librarians have been involved with this exhaustive research project to create a database that has the details for many of the missing plates. The missing information was gleaned from in-depth reviews of Midway’s deck logs and ship’s newsletters, and sometimes from the pilots themselves.
The curatorial team is looking to replicate the brass plates missing on several of the plaques by using an onboard engraving machine. The cost for the new brass plates is being covered by revenue generated from Midway bookstore sales.
The goal is to ultimately display the plaques somewhere along a guest tour route. Currently, passageways near the airwing spaces and clean-shirt wardroom are being considered as possible display locations.
“This project has been long in the making, and it is great to see it finally start to move towards completion,” said Dave. “The first of the plaques to be shined up looks great.”
The curatorial team hopes that by displaying the plaques, it will be another source of interesting knowledge for museum guests about the Navy and naval aviation.
“I hope it helps the public understand how many landings have been made on the ship, which should be an amazing number to most guests, as most of them don’t visualize the pace of operations or the fact that Midway had been doing this for 47 years,” said Dave. “It also tells the story of a Navy tradition of keeping track of such milestone landings. Perhaps, by having the display open to the public, we might get some of the later pilots to give us information to help fill in the gaps.”
Comments are closed.