Wave-Off!: A History of LSOs and Ship-Board Landings

by Robert R. “Boom” Powell

Specialty Press, $39.95

For a number of years, Specialty Press has been producing books in a seemingly standard 10 ¼-inch square, approximately 200-page format. “Boom” Powell’s Wave Off! is among them. That in itself, says nothing about the book, yet it does.

A series of books gives the reader expectations; a sense of quality, presentation, attention to detail, factualness, readability, and even likeability. That’s the truth of these books. Once you have seen two, you have a reasonable expectation of what you will get with a third. It’s a comfort.

And so it is with Wave Off!

First thing—I wasn’t disappointed. Second is the flip side of that comfort—surprise. And I was.

I am familiar with Boom’s work and background. It’s hard to poke around the Internet and not cross paths with him if your search terms include “naval aviation,” “Scooter,” and “Viggie.” So combine a known container and a known content provider and you should get what you expect. And more. That’s the surprise.

This book goes far beyond a history of LSOs—Landing Signal Officers—the seasoned pilots who stand on the port quarter of a carrier guiding—and grading—their fellows to a controlled crash onto the flight deck. The story has to start at the beginning and it does, with the pre-carrier days, when Britain and the United States first began trying to combine ships and the new fangled contraptions called aircraft.

What is so enjoyable about this author’s work is that he deftly melds the human experience with what is essentially a nuts’n’bolts story. Granted he has a lot to work with, the line between fact and sea story is often easily and readily blurred. And he is not afraid of limbs. Historians love—or hate—“firsts.” Nothing gets their attention quicker than seeing that word. Firsts are seldom black-and-white. Take first-to-fly for example. Unless you carefully insert the modifiers “engine powered” and “controlled” among a couple others, you’d be wrong. Powell enumerates a fair number of firsts in this work, but is seldom declarative. He paints the full picture, so the reader walks away with not a simple fact, but an understanding. Such is found in his description of the first LSO: “There are many stories on how the LSO came to be; some apocryphal, some embellished. The most accurate . . .”

Powell not only provides basic instruction and comprehensive illustration of American “Paddles,” but also British, Japanese, and French techniques. The Japanese used a light system, which somewhat presaged the current optical landing system first deployed on U.S. carriers in the mid-50s. Unlike a human being, the Japanese system could not provide the “stable approach” and “anticipate the ship’s movement” in heavy seas to get a safe landing.

The author delves into the minutia of paddle construction, LSO platform and training before walking the reader through the carrier battles and operations of World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, and today’s “flashpoints.”

For me, the most significant chapter is the “Landing at Sea Revolution” in carrier operations fostered by the turbojet engine. Faster/farther required heavier aircraft. Aircraft design for higher speeds almost naturally forced higher landing speeds. Through World War II and the Korean War straight-deck carriers—think floating moving pitching rolling tombstone—handled flight ops by stringing cable barriers between landing space and parking. This even worked for the Generation One jets off Korea. But there was no safe way to make good a botched landing attempt; thus the impetus for the angled deck. Add the mirror landing system, which was now stabilized to the ship’s movements, and high-powered steam catapults, and you have the basis—with a few thousand more tons—of a supercarrier. Boom nicely packages this narrative.

I mentioned surprises. A two-page sidebar, “Let’s Add a Hook,” is one. It discusses adding hooks to what were only designed and built as land-based aircraft. It includes a fantastic full-page painting by Craig Kodera of a modified P-51D Mustang, renamed Seahorse for the Navy, on approach to Shangri-La (CV-38) during November 1944 trials.

My biggest surprise though, is the VA-46 landing chart on p. 134, which happened to be provided by a friend, retired Captain Dave Dollarhide, who also happens to be listed on the chart. What it doesn’t mention is that most likely this chart was from Forrestal’s (CVA-59) ill-fated Southeast Asia cruise to Yankee Station in July 1967.

Get this book. Find your own surprises. They are here in abundance.

“Wave-Off!” is available from Specialty Press at 1-800-895-4585 or www.specialtypress.com.

Reviewed May 2017