Navy's First Cohort of Female Carrier-Based Aircraft Pilot Trainees Complete Solo Carrier-Landing Assessment
Navy's First Cohort of Female Carrier-Based Aircraft Pilot Trainees Complete Solo Carrier Landing. Photo by Liao Chao. PLA Daily report by Jia Yizhen and reporter Qian Xiaohu: Clouds race and waves surge over Bohai Bay. Recently, the Navy's first cohort of female carrier-based aircraft pilot trainees all passed the daytime solo carrier-landing assessment. This marks an important step forward in the Navy's cultivation of female carrier-based aviation personnel and a further improvement in the construction of the Naval Aviation talent pipeline (人才梯队).
"Take off!" At around 10 a.m., following the command from the control tower, female pilot trainee Han Meng steadily pushed the throttle forward, and the aircraft lifted off the ground. The sea winds were strong and the waves were high, and the fuselage shook violently. Inside the cockpit, Han Meng made fine adjustments to the collective with her left hand while her right hand lightly held the cyclic stick, precisely correcting her heading.
The aircraft skimmed over the sea, the powerful airflow churned up by the rotor blades carrying water mist, carving a white streak across the blue waves—a wake swallowed in an instant by the surging swells. Entering the carrier-landing segment, the ship swayed with the swells and the deck heaved unpredictably. Han Meng kept her eyes fixed on the changes in the airflow at the ship's stern, carefully cross-checking altitude and airspeed, her fingertips sensing the feedback from the control stick. As the landing signals officer's instructions came through, Han Meng seized the brief window of the ship's momentary stability, decisively cut power and lowered the collective, and the helicopter touched down on the ship with a near-zero-load attitude, completing a "three-point" carrier landing in one fluid motion.
"When landing on the ship, it felt as though there was an invisible 'high wall' in front of me, and the psychological pressure surged suddenly," Han Meng said, unable to conceal her excitement as she stepped off the aircraft. Turbulence at sea, deck heave, and wake disturbance all put her precision of control and psychological resilience to the test; every micro-adjustment of the control surfaces and every degree of heading correction required tempering through a thousand trials.
The solo carrier landing is a critical threshold in the growth of a carrier-based aircraft pilot and the "qualification certificate" for entering real combat operations over sea and sky. The leadership of the training unit introduced that during the carrier-landing subject training for the first cohort of female pilot trainees, they implemented an organization-and-training model of "instructor-led flights, layered progression, and staged solo release" (教官带飞、分层递进、梯次放单), fully drawing out the female pilot trainees' qualities of composure, attentiveness, and smooth control inputs, while simultaneously reinforcing weak areas such as attitude perception, instrument interpretation, and deviation correction. Training plans were tailored individually for each trainee and each subject, with strict oversight maintained throughout the entire process from ground simulation and deduction, to airborne execution, to debrief and critique. After each sortie landed, instructors immediately led trainees to retrieve flight parameter data, replaying control trajectories second by second, and centering discussion on qualifying, attributing causes to, and devising remedies for control deviations, with corrections implemented on the spot. Through the closed-loop training cycle of "fly once, evaluate once, improve once" (飞一次、评一次、升一次), the first cohort of female carrier-based aircraft pilot trainees achieved steady improvement in their ship-aircraft coordination capabilities.
Reporters at the scene observed that after the first female pilot trainee successfully landed on the ship, several more aircraft, under the precise coordination of the landing signals officers, followed in close succession with orderly takeoffs and landings, and all of the first cohort of female carrier-based aircraft pilot trainees successfully completed the assessment. In the next phase, they will proceed in turn to training and assessment in high-difficulty subjects including formation flying and night carrier landings.