On 30 October 1963 the crew of USS Forrestal watched a four-engined transport with a 132-foot wingspan come down their deck. It had no tailhook. It had no catapult attachment. The ship’s island cleared its wingtip by about fifteen feet. It stopped, turned around under its own power, and flew off again.

That aeroplane, a Marine Corps KC-130F on loan to the Naval Air Test Center, still holds the record for the largest and heaviest aircraft ever to land on an aircraft carrier. Nobody has tried to beat it in sixty-three years.

Meanwhile the F-22 Raptor cannot go anywhere near a carrier deck. It is smaller than the C-130 Hércules. It is lighter than the Hercules. It even has a tailhook. It still cannot do it.

Both facts point at the same thing, and it is not the thing most people assume. Getting aboard a carrier is not a question of size. It is a question of what the airframe was built to survive.

What “carrier-capable” actually means

A runway does not move. It is a mile or two long, it sits at a fixed heading, and it is exactly where the chart says it is. A carrier landing area is a few hundred feet of angled deck that pitches, rolls, and travels away from the approaching aircraft at thirty knots while the ship wanders slightly off the briefed course.

That difference changes the whole design brief. A carrier arrival is not really a landing. The pilot does not flare. The aircraft is flown into the deck at a constant rate of descent, the throttles go forward at touchdown in case the hook misses every wire, and the arresting gear does the stopping. Nothing about that sequence is gentle.

Put numbers on it and the gap opens up immediately. Under 14 CFR 25.473, a transport-category airliner’s structure has to cope with a limit descent velocity of 10 feet per second at design landing weight, and 6 feet per second at design take-off weight. The carrier-variant F-35C was designed for a maximum descent rate of 26.4 feet per second. The wartime F6F Hellcat was tested to 19. The energy the structure has to absorb goes with the square of that speed, so at 26.4 feet per second a carrier aircraft is soaking up roughly seven times the vertical impact energy that an airliner’s gear is ever certified to take.

Everything else follows from that. A carrier aircraft needs a tailhook anchored into reinforced keel structure, not bolted to the tail. It needs landing gear engineered for that sink rate, which means heavier legs, bigger oleos and stronger attachment frames. It needs a launch bar on the nose gear and a nose-gear structure able to take the aircraft’s entire weight in tension when the catapult fires.

Then come the parts nobody photographs. Folding wings, because deck and hangar space is the real currency of a carrier air wing. Corrosion protection good for years of salt spray. Low-speed handling stable enough to fly a precise approach at a high angle of attack with the nose up and the wing near its limit. And a bigger wing to make that possible, which is exactly why the F-35C has a noticeably larger wing than the land-based F-35A and pays for it in fuel burn.

The tailhook nearly everyone misreads

Here is the detail that surprises people. The F-22 does have a tailhook. So does the F-16. So does the Eurofighter Typhoon and most other land-based fighters. It is simply not the same device.

A land-based hook is emergency equipment, sized for a runway-barrier engagement after a blown tyre, a brake failure or an aborted take-off. Air-force bases keep shore-based arresting gear at the runway ends for exactly that. Some of these hooks are nitrogen-charged units that ground crew have to service and recharge after a single use, because a single use is what they are for. Land-based gear and hooks are not built to absorb the loads of a routine carrier recovery.

A naval hook is the opposite. It is primary structure, it is used on every single landing, and the whole aft fuselage is designed around the load path that runs from the hook point into the keel. Fitting one to an aircraft that was never designed for it is not a modification. It is a redesign of the back half of the aeroplane.

Even purpose-built naval fighters get this wrong. In 2012 it emerged that the F-35C’s tailhook could not reliably engage an arresting wire. The cause was traced to the shape of the hook point and to a faulty wire-dynamics model supplied by Naval Air Systems Command, and the fix involved reshaping the point and retuning the hold-down damper that stops the hook bouncing on touchdown.

The aircraft did not make its first arrested landing aboard a ship until 3 November 2014, on USS Nimitz, flown by Commander Tony Wilson. That is a fighter conceived from the outset as a carrier aeroplane, by a country with more carrier experience than everybody else combined, and the hook still took years to get right.

Why there is no naval F-22

The Navy did look. Congress told it to. From late 1988 a Naval Advanced Tactical Fighter office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base studied a carrier version of the Air Force’s Advanced Tactical Fighter as a replacement for the F-14 Tomcat, and the existing ATF contracts were amended to cover it.

The shopping list was predictable and brutal. Reinforced fuselage and keel for the hook. Landing gear rated to 24 feet per second. A strengthened nose gear and forward fuselage for catapult shots. More wing area for low-speed control on the approach. GlobalSecurity’s account of the programme puts the structural penalty at roughly 30 per cent on the fuselage and landing gear.

That is the trap, and it is arithmetic rather than engineering timidity. Adding 30 per cent to the heaviest structural assemblies of an aircraft already at the top of its weight class does not produce a slightly heavier fighter. It produces one whose projected gross take-off weight runs past what the ship can launch and, more importantly, past what the ship can catch.

The programme was cancelled in early 1991, before the Air Force had even chosen between the YF-22 and the YF-23. The Navy argued that a run of upgrades to its existing Tomcats would cover fleet air superiority into the 2010s. History did not cooperate: the F-14 was retired in 2006, and the job went to the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet instead.

So the honest answer to “why can’t the F-22 land on a carrier” is not that it is too big, and not that its hook is too weak. It is that the aircraft which could have done it was never built, because building it would have produced something too heavy to be worth operating.

The record that still stands

In 1963 the Chief of Naval Operations wanted an answer to a logistics question: could a genuinely large transport fly heavy loads a long way and put them directly onto a deck, without the relay of small aircraft the fleet relied on? The shorthand was “Super-COD”, and the way to find out was to try it.

The test aircraft was KC-130F BuNo 149798, borrowed from the Marine Corps. The refuelling pods came off, the nose gear was modified and better anti-skid braking went on. No tailhook was fitted, and none was wanted. Somebody painted LOOK MA, NO HOOK on the forward fuselage, which tells you a good deal about the mood of the crew.

The first phase ran off the Florida coast on 30 October 1963, touch-and-goes into a wind of around forty knots. Full-stop landings followed in November. By the end the aircraft had made 29 touch-and-goes, 21 unarrested full-stop landings and 21 unassisted take-offs, at weights ranging from 85,000 lb up to 121,000 lb.

At that maximum test weight the National Naval Aviation Museum, which holds the aeroplane, records 495 feet to stop and 795 feet to get airborne again. Lighter runs pulled up in under 300 feet, and on one approach the Hercules touched down about 150 feet from the stern. Contemporary accounts of the trial differ by a few tens of feet on the exact distances, which is worth saying plainly rather than quietly picking the most impressive number.

“I am always running into people who say they were there — although I don’t recall seeing that many people on the deck”

James H. Flatley III — the test pilot, later Rear Admiral, recalling the 1963 Forrestal trials, quoted by Vintage Aviation News

Flatley flew it with Lt Cdr W. W. “Smokey” Stovall in the right seat, ADR1 Ed Brennan as flight engineer and Lockheed test pilot Ted Limmer aboard. Flatley received the Distinguished Flying Cross; Stovall and Brennan received Air Medals.

And then the Navy said no. The trial proved the thing was possible, not that it was sensible. The margins leaned on a strong natural wind, a cooperative sea and one exceptional crew, none of which a supply chain can be built on. The service bought the Grumman C-2 Greyhound instead, and 149798 went back to ordinary service until it retired in 2005. It is now on display at Pensacola.

So could a 747 land on a carrier?

No, and the numbers are not remotely close. A Nimitz-class carrier is 1,092 feet long overall with a flight deck 252 feet wide, and only a fraction of that length is usable landing area. A 747 needs thousands of feet of runway even light, its gear is certified to that 10-feet-per-second airliner standard, and there is nowhere on the airframe to attach a hook that would not simply tear out.

The more interesting point is that the Hercules record has stood for sixty-three years not because the feat is impossible to repeat, but because the Navy spent those decades making the question unnecessary. The answer to “how do we get bulky cargo to a carrier” turned out to be a purpose-built aeroplane of modest size rather than a very large one flown very carefully.

The C-2A Greyhound entered service in the 1960s and carried up to 10,000 lb of cargo or 26 passengers at a maximum take-off weight of 60,000 lb, on a wingspan of 80 ft 7 in that folded back alongside the fuselage. Half the weight of the Hercules trial, a third less span, and every carrier feature the Hercules deliberately did without.

It made its last carrier arrested landing in June 2026 and flew for the final time on 28 July 2026. Its replacement, the CMV-22B Osprey, sidesteps the problem altogether by not needing a landing run at all — which is its own kind of answer to the question this article started with.

The deck is the design brief

Every carrier aircraft is a negotiation with a short strip of moving steel, and the terms are always the same: more structure, more wing, more weight, less of everything else. The F-35C accepts a bigger wing and heavier gear than the F-35A and pays in fuel burn. The Super Hornet is larger and draggier than a comparable land-based fighter partly because it has to arrive at a speed a human being and a steel cable can both handle.

The F-22 never paid that tax. That is precisely why it is the better land-based air-superiority fighter, and precisely why it will never see a flight deck. Meanwhile a Marine Corps tanker with no hook at all still holds the record, because in 1963 somebody asked the question properly and then went out and found the answer.

Sources: National Naval Aviation Museum and the Naval Historical Foundation on the KC-130F Forrestal trials; Vintage Aviation News on BuNo 149798; 14 CFR 25.473; GlobalSecurity on the Naval Advanced Tactical Fighter; USNI News on the F-35C tailhook redesign; The Aviationist on the F-35C’s first arrested landing; the US Navy aircraft carrier fact file; Wikipedia (Lockheed C-130 Hercules, Grumman C-2 Greyhound, Tailhook, Drop test).