@Stevie:
I get it from Navy guys that do for a living…and doing it in the trainer myself. Yes - the ship steers into the wind. But when you break across the bow and fly a circle vise box pattern the ship/touchdown point have moved to be in the position of your baseline course by the time you get to the groove - which is why it works, and works very well.
You could also manipulate a rectangular type pattern to arrive at the start in the correct position, it would just require too much space and would not enable small adjustments. Fixed-wing recovery procedures are designed for efficiency and precision, hence the racetrack type pattern. Let me know if you can back up your statement, because CV NATOPS does not (to my knowledge. I’ve read it a few times.)
@Frederf:
It’s actually possible to steer the boat such that the vector addition of the ship’s motion and the wind vector combine through vector addition to make the wind aligned with the angled deck. If I remember the deck is angled 17°. If the ship goes forward 25 knots and the wind is 11 knots then you steer 44 degrees right of the eye of the wind. The total wind would be aligned with the deck.
Absolutely, but if there is not sufficient wind over the deck, the boat will “make its own wind” by sailing faster, which it cannot do along the angle deck. That necessarily introduces crosswind for the pilot to counteract. See page 4-10 http://www.cnatra.navy.mil/pubs/folder5/T45/P-1211.PDF I don’t think Stevie’s T-45 sim ride involved this.