Bolter (aviation)
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In naval aviation, a bolter is an aircraft that touches down while landing on an aircraft carrier's flight deck but fails to catch the arrestor cable, and is accelerating to full throttle in order to fly off the deck with enough airspeed to regain altitude and go around to attempt the landing again.[1]
Until the 1950s, when carrier flight decks ran the length of the ship, the only way to prevent landing aircraft which had missed the arrestor cables from colliding with aircraft about to launch was through the use of a crash barrier or net rigged amidships.[1] The development of jet aircraft for carrier operations brought about several problems.[1] The higher minimum airspeed of jet aircraft meant that any aircraft landing on a centreline flight deck would require most of the length of the deck to stop, even with arrestor equipment.[1] As aircraft could not be parked on deck or launched and recovered simultaneously, there would have been a significant slowing of carrier operations.[1] The solution to this problem was to angle the landing deck off the centreline of the carrier.
Not only did the angled flight deck increase the landing space available while allowing simultaneous launch and recovery, aircraft that had to abort the landing due to missing arrestor cables or other incidents could accelerate along the length of the landing deck and take off again without interfering with other aircraft on the deck or catapults.[1] On American aircraft carriers, an aborted landing is accompanied by the radio call "bolter, bolter".
