Navy's First Cohort of Female Carrier-Based Aircraft Student Pilots Complete Solo Carrier-Landing Assessment
Navy's First Cohort of Female Carrier-Based Aircraft Student Pilots Complete Solo Carrier-Landing Assessment
Reported by Jia Yizhen and correspondent Qian Xiaohu for the PLA Daily: Bohai Bay, clouds racing and waves surging. Recently, the Navy's first cohort of female carrier-based aircraft student pilots 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 strengthening 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 student pilot Han Meng steadily advanced the throttle and the aircraft lifted off the ground. Winds were strong and waves ran high over the sea surface, and the fuselage shook violently. Inside the cockpit, Han Meng made fine adjustments to the collective with her left hand while lightly holding the cyclic with her right, precisely correcting her heading.
The aircraft skimmed low over the sea; the powerful airflow churned up by the rotor blades swept up a mist of water, carving a white ribbon across the blue waves — a wake swallowed almost instantly by the swells. Entering the carrier-landing approach segment, the ship swayed with the swells and the deck rose and fell 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 reading the feedback from the control stick. As the landing signals officer's commands came through, Han Meng seized the brief window of relative stability in the ship's motion, decisively reduced throttle and lowered the collective, and the helicopter touched down on the ship with a near-zero-overload attitude in one smooth motion, completing a "three-point" landing in a single fluid sequence.
"When landing on the ship, it felt as though an invisible 'high wall' had appeared before me, and the psychological pressure surged suddenly," Han Meng said, barely concealing her excitement as she stepped down from the aircraft. Turbulence at sea, deck heave, and wake disturbance all test precision of control and psychological resilience (心理韧性); every micro-adjustment of a control surface and every degree of heading correction requires 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 entry into real maritime combat. The leadership of the training unit introduced that during the first cohort of female student pilots' carrier-landing subject training, they implemented an organization-and-training model of "instructor-led flights, layered progression, and graduated solo release" (教官带飞、分层递进、梯次放单), fully drawing out the female student pilots' 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, subject by subject, with strict oversight throughout — from ground simulation and deduction, to airborne execution, to debrief and critique. After each sortie landed, instructors immediately led the students in pulling flight parameter data, replaying the control trajectory second by second, and characterizing, attributing causes to, and devising corrective measures for each control deviation, 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 student pilots achieved steady improvement in ship-aircraft coordination capability.
This correspondent observed on site that after the first female student pilot successfully landed on the ship, several more aircraft followed in close succession under the precise coordination of the landing signals officers, taking off and landing in an orderly sequence, and the entire first cohort of female carrier-based aircraft student pilots 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.