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Comment by travisjungroth | Hacker News Reader

I think there may not have been a better airplane for landing on a carrier than a Bird Dog. Those things have amazing landing performance. With the tanks empty, it might not even have been overloaded.

What I don't get is why they couldn't make radio contact. There are standard emergency frequencies (121.5, 243) that the pilot should have known about and the ship tried to contact them on.

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[1] says there was no headset, though who knows where they're getting that information from. The photos in the article do kind of look like the pilot is bare-headed.

1: http://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675069507_evacuation-of-...

That would totally make sense, thanks. I doubt they had speakers and hand-mics, although civilian Cessnas of the era sometimes did.

A wild guess: given the airplane's role as a spotter, it only had radio for communicating with troops in the field, and that was on different bands?

Or they threw the radio out to save weight.

Or, like the helicopters on deck in the story, any useful equipment that could quickly be stripped during retreat and evacuation was already gone.

That seems unlikely given that he knew his only chance was landing on a carrier or ditching close to a ship. Also, I don’t know if that airplane had an easily removable radios.

There's also the class of extreme STOL aircraft that includes the Wilga (Polish) and Storch (German). They would be perfect for this, but obviously they weren't present in that situation.

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