Every carrier landing is designed around a hook and a wire. The pilot flies the jet onto the deck, the tailhook snags one of the arresting cables, and the aircraft stops in a couple of seconds. But what happens when the hook will not come down, or the landing gear is damaged, and the jet still has to come aboard because there is nowhere else to go?

The answer is one of the most dramatic sights in naval aviation: a giant nylon net, raised across the landing area in minutes, that catches the aircraft by its wings. This is the carrier barricade, and while it is rarely used, every carrier crew trains to rig it.

Why Carriers Need a Net at All

A normal carrier landing is an arrested landing. The tailhook engages one of several wires stretched across the deck, and arresting engines below deck absorb the jet’s energy. If the pilot misses every wire, the aircraft simply flies off the angled deck and goes around, which is called a bolter.

The system depends on the hook. If the hook is damaged, will not lower, or the aircraft has a landing gear or structural problem that makes a normal trap too dangerous, the crew needs a different way to stop it. If a land base is within range the jet can divert, but far out at sea there may be no runway close enough.

Not What You Think on how emergency landings on aircraft carriers work.

How the Barricade Works

The modern barricade is built from nylon webbing. Upper and lower horizontal loading straps are joined at their ends, with vertical engaging straps hanging between them. When rigged, the webbing stands roughly 20 feet high between two stanchions that are raised from recesses in the flight deck.

Instead of catching a hook, the barricade catches the aircraft itself. The vertical straps wrap over the wings, and the energy of the landing is transmitted through purchase cables to the same kind of arresting engines that the wires use. The jet is dragged to a stop in a tangle of webbing, usually with damage to the aircraft but with the crew unhurt.

Normally the barricade is stowed. It is rigged only when an emergency recovery is needed, and speed matters, because the aircraft overhead may be short of fuel. A well-trained flight deck crew can rig it in under three minutes, which is why carriers practise it regularly.

From Straight Decks to the Nylon Barricade

On the straight-deck carriers of the Second World War and the years that followed, safety nets were part of every landing. A low barrier of about 3 to 4 feet caught the landing gear of any aircraft whose hook missed the wires, and a taller barricade of about 15 feet protected the aircraft parked further forward on the deck.

The early 1950s brought a nylon barricade designed to catch the aircraft by its wings. Writing in the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings in November 1953, two US Navy commanders described how far it had spread.

The same article discussed the angled deck, which tilted the landing area eight to ten degrees to port of the ship’s centerline. Once aircraft that missed the wires could simply take off again over the side, the everyday barrier was no longer needed. The barricade survived as an emergency device.

A Real Barricade Landing: USS Enterprise, 1978

The photo above shows exactly why the barricade exists. During a Western Pacific deployment aboard USS Enterprise in 1978, an A-6E Intruder of Attack Squadron 196 came back with its right main landing gear unable to extend fully. According to the US Navy caption, a broken cotter pin had let a nut on the drag brace tighten with each cycle of the gear.

A normal arrested landing on a partly extended gear leg risked a crash on deck. The crew flew the jet into the barricade instead, and the webbing brought it to a stop across the landing area.

Footage of an A-6 Intruder night barricade landing on USS Ranger, published by What You Haven’t Seen.

Testing a Net You Hope Never to Use

Because barricade engagements are rare, they are tested on land. At Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey, an unmanned F/A-18E Super Hornet was driven into a barricade on 3 September 1997 by a jet-powered test car, engaging at 110.8 knots and coming to rest about 200 yards later.

In April 2019, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems carried out the first exploratory barricade arrestment test of its Advanced Arresting Gear, the system fitted to the new Ford-class carriers, at the Lakehurst jet car track. An E-2C+ Hawkeye weighing about 46,500 pounds was accelerated into a net connected to the new gear and stopped safely. It was the first barricade test of its kind in 23 years.

Ford-class crews now rig the barricade as part of their regular flight deck drills, as in the photo at the top of this article, taken aboard USS Gerald R. Ford in March 2025.

Footage of an F/A-18C night barricade engagement on USS Constellation, published by What You Haven’t Seen.

Sources: Wikipedia, Arresting gear; US Naval Institute Proceedings, “A Brighter Future for Carrier Aviation”, November 1953; Boeing news release, 3 September 1997; Naval Technology, April 2019; US Navy photo captions via Wikimedia Commons