We ‘land-lubbers,’ as the Navy likes to call us, take off and land on runways that are about 2600 meters (8500 feet) long, and INS Vikrant is 262 meters (860 feet).
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A modern fighter lands at about 250 KMPH, which is 70 meters per second.
That means at the landing speed, the plane will cross the entire length of the ship in less than 4 seconds!
There are 3 arrester wires on the deck, and the aircraft has a hook behind the landing gear. The hook engages the wire, and the wire stops the aircraft, rather violently.
Vikrant is also 62 meters (203 ft) wide. The length of the zone with arrester wires is just a part (small?) of the total length, so a landing has to be pretty precise aboard a relatively small deck (by way of a modern comparison, a Nimitz class carrier is 1,092 feet long and 252 feet wide). An Essex class (WW2 vintage!) carrier with the angled deck upgrade would be similar in landing area size to Vikrant.
And then there's this, "first ever
night landing". Oceans don't have street lights, obviously. The only lights are on the plane and on the ship. And while the lights aboard the ship are helpful/essential, I'm pretty sure they mess with the pilot's depth perception.
Vikrant is the first carrier built in Indian shipyards. It'll be interesting to see how its reliability compares to Russia's Admiral Kuznetsov (woof! woof!) and China's Fujian (or France's Charles De Gaulle, woof! woof!).