carriers, we tend to think of something like this.  A large, impressive ship – basically a floating  

town- replete with all the equipment needed to  operate and maintain a squadron of naval aircraft  

at sea. What doesn’t come to mind is this. Now  this may look like a glorified zipline with an  

aircraft slung underneath, but this was in-fact  a device used during the second world war to  

launch and recover aircraft at sea. Known as the Brodie Landing System,  

it was developed in late 1943 as the solution  to a very specific problem. By this point,  

light aircraft built by Aeronca, Piper,  Stinson and Taylorcraft were putting in  

some considerable work with the US Army. Known  collectively as ‘grasshoppers’ they were used  

for a multitude of duties: VIP transports,  army liaison, medical evacuation, and in the  

Pacific both the Army and the Marine Corps were  beginning to use them for artillery spotting.  

The problem was range. Many of the islands  that the US Army needed to capture were  

scattered across large stretches of ocean,  and the Grasshoppers lacked the effective  

range to hop between them. The Army quickly  realized that their fleet of small aircraft  

was essentially out of service until airfields  could be captured or built in these new areas.  

This meant that during the initial assaults,  ground troops would have to rely on long-range  

reconnaissance or naval aircraft to provide their  eyes in the sky, and this was not ideal. Weather,  

the enemy, or even superseding orders could  delay or prevent these aircraft from operating,  

and the Army needed something much closer, and  more importantly, under their direct control.  

Enter Captain James H Brodie of the Army  Transportation Corps. His day job was  

redesigning cargo ships to improve their chances  of survival – the Battle of the Atlantic was still  

raging at full force – but in is off-hours he was  working on something different. He understood the  

importance of aircraft being fielded at sea,  the use of catapult ships in the Atlantic  

being a prime example of this, but he was also  conscious of the drawbacks of existing systems:  

Merchant Carriers were slow and expensive,  catapult ships often expended their aircraft  

rather than re-using them, and assigning fleet  carriers for convoy duties was such a waste of  

resources that only a lunatic would consider it. It was during his nightly sketch sessions that he  

stumbled upon a new idea, one that he quickly  realised could be suitable for both the Army  

and the Navy. Instead of using a catapult, the  aircraft would be suspended below a cable and  

take-off under its own power. This cable could  be slung on booms over the side of a ship,  

or between a series of poles on land. This was not the first time that this  

recovery method had been contemplated. Back in  1913, Louis Bleriot had conducted similar tests,  

with his plane suspended beneath cables, and in  the 1930s the Army Air Corps had experimented  

with hooks and cables for docking aircraft  with airships. But Brodies proposal, despite  

looking remarkably chaotic, was probably the  sanest attempt at this sort of thing thus far.  

The operation of the system, be it on land or at  sea, was fairly straightforward. And thankfully,  

there is some wonderful footage of its  use, courtesy of the National Archives.  

The cable acted as the runway, and two specially  designed slings and trolleys were used for  

take-off and landing. The take-off trolley  consisted of a wheel, a wooden friction shoe,  

and an emergency release. Attached to this  was the sling, a four-foot nylon rope with  

an eye and shackle at the top, a round lifting  ring in the middle, and a stirrup at the bottom.  

The plane's hook was put into the stirrup,  a lifting derrick carried it upward by the  

middle ring, and the top shackle was attached  to the trolley. This had to be manually done,  

with a man being hoisted up to complete the  attachment, which would have been interesting  

as the engine was often running at this point. A travel release consisting of a long hold-back  

line and a spring-loaded trip prevented the  aircraft from beginning its run until the  

engine was at full power. An emergency release  was built in to trigger if the plane had not  

been released from the trolley before the end of  its take-off run. Said run was relatively short,  

without wind, an average take-off from the  cable took 400 feet, with wind it could be  

done in as little as 200, but to provide a  margin of error and safety the cable’s full  

take-off length was designed at 600 feet. For landing a different trolley and sling was  

used. The trolley was designed to give a pendulum  effect during hook-up to reduce the inertial  

forces on both the aircraft and the cable. And  the landing sling consisted of three loops of  

nylon rope; these were spread across a six-foot  frame to provide a wide target for the pilot,  

who only needed to hook one of them. Once  hooked on, the aircraft was slowed by an  

arresting brake. The brake line attached to a drum  on the mast which acted like a giant fishing reel;  

not only was this simple, but it allowed the  tension of the line to be adjusted for different  

aircraft weights. The brake gradually applied  force, reaching its maximum strength once the  

trolley had travelled approximately 50 feet  along the cable. Ideally, this meant that  

the breaking force never subject the pilot or  the aircraft to more than one third of a gee.  

When submitting his proposal to the Army,  Captain Brodie could be forgiven for feeling  

confident. Despite being highly unorthodox, his  design had numerous advantages. Logistically,  

for remote operations, it seemed almost perfect.  Weighing less than 7,000 pounds, including tools  

and tackle, it was light enough to be parachuted  into the field from a cargo plane, or if roads  

were available, it could be transported by a pair  of trucks. It only required hand-operated tools to  

assemble, which meant that even in remote areas it  could be made ready for use withing 12 hours. When  

operating at sea, it required far less structural  changes than a traditional catapult system.  

Additionally, Brodie’s design could be operated  in areas where the construction of traditional  

landing strips was either impossible or  uneconomical. It could easily be installed  

in jungle clearings, the shores of lagoon, or  the mountainous terrain of southeast Asia. Also,  

it was easy to camouflage, and the lack of a  giant runway made it all but impossible to spot  

from the air- unless the recon aircraft  was below a few hundred feet anyway.  

Brodie’s proposal certainly raised a few  eyebrows at the Transportation Corps,  

and there were a large number of sceptics, but  he was eventually given a $10,000 grant to build  

a test model. This he did at New Orleans, where he  was based, with work beginning in April of 1943.  

As it was expected to be the most challenging  environment, Brodie built his first rig to  

simulate operations aboard a ship. The  rig itself was built without much issue,  

but he did find it difficult to find  a willing test pilot. Unsurprisingly,  

most pilots had reservations about trying to hook  onto a glorified clothesline, especially as its  

designer clearly had more experience with ships  rather than aircraft. Eventually, with dogged  

perseverance, and after frightning away half the  transient pilots of Louisiana, Brodie secured  

some willing hands and work got underway. Using a Stinson L-5 Sentinel, the first take-off  

was completed in late August, and then on the  3rd of September the first take-off, flight,  

and successful “landing” was completed as well.  These first few flights were done with various  

pilots, but by mid-September Brodie finally  had somebody willing and enthusiastic enough  

to continue testing the system long-term,  Flying Officer Raymond Gregory.  

Despite a mishap that involved a prop-strike  on the landing trolley, with Gregory and  

Brodie both narrowly avoiding an unwelcome  encounter with various pieces flying metal,  

the testing went relatively smoothly.  Experimentation was by trial and error,  

but during the autumn months the problems of  braking, shock absorption, and handling were each  

addressed; and Late in the year Brodie obtained  the cargo ship City of Dalhart, with which he was  

able to further improve his design with actual sea  landings, rather than those on a simulated rig.  

After more than ten successful take-offs  and landings aboard the ship at sea,  

Brodie’s design was confirmed to be viable,  but despite this surprising success it would  

never find use with the US Army. By the end of  1943 their interest in the project had waned,  

and if it hadn’t been for some sudden interest  by the Navy and the Marine Corps, the Brodie  

System may never have seen actual use. Aboard the City of Dalhart, the system  

had been used during training manoeuvres, and  the Brodie-launched aircraft performed well,  

even taking off during a heavy fog that grounded  all others. Impressed with the relative simplicity  

of the system, and especially the fact that  it could be used on land as well as sea,  

the Navy issued a contract for 25 to be  installed aboard their L.S.Ts. Unfortunately,  

progress on completing these conversions was slow,  and only a handful would see active service.  

However one of these, LST-776, which was  affectionately nicknamed the USS Brodie  

after the systems creator, proved the success  of the system beyond a doubt. In training up her  

pilots, she completed over 500 successful launches  and recoveries before sailing out to her destined  

Battlezone: Iwo Jima. Here the ship itself had  rotten luck; she collided with another LST,  

suffered several engine failures, and had  a hole knocked into her bottom. Half sunk,  

she was repaired and then sent to Leyte Gulf.  By this point she was down on pilots owing  

to drafts to other ships, and this led to an  amusing incident involving one Lieutenant Earl  

Montgomery. Based on Leyte itself, he was told  to fly out a recently modified Sentinel and to  

“watch out for an LST with a cable rig sticking  over the side”. He eventually found said LST,  

and after making a successful hookup on  his second attempt, he stepped aboard and  

was immediately told “Well done, you’re  now an instructor”. Apparently he must  

have done a decent job as the ship recorded few  incidents during the latter half of her service.  

The ship and her strange equipment  went on to serve well at Okinawa,  

flying multiple spotting and recon sorties,  but by the summer of 1945 her time was done.  

The last mission had been the planned invasion  of Japan, but that of course never happened,  

and by now the first appearances of helicopters  rendered the Brodie system utterly useless.  

Attempts were made after the war to try and find  a commercial niche for the system to fill, but  

nothing eventuated. And so, one of the strangeer  experiments involving ship-borne aircraft came  

to and edn, and promptly fell into obscurity. As always, thank you all so much for watching,  

and a big thank you of course to the Patrons,  who’s wonderful names should be appearing on  

the screen now, my my there are quite a lot  of you now. And a special shoutout to the Wing  

Commanders, the highest tier members of this  wonderful collection of people. I hope you  

all enjoyed this slightly different video, I think  I’ll do a few more of these here and there to keep  

things different . But as always, thank you all so  much and I’ll catch you all next time. Goodbye.