What Happens When A Pilot Fails to Land on An Aircraft Carrier? An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and facilities for carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering aircraft. These 1,000 feet long vessels can operate as mobile air bases, storing anywhere from 60 to over 130 planes and helicopters and allowing them to operate far from land. A normal arrestment is accomplished when the arresting hook of an incoming aircraft engages one of the deck pendants. When a landing aircraft engages a deck pendant, the force of the forward motion of the landing aircraft is transferred to a purchase cable which is routed via sheaves to the arresting engine, located in a machinery room below the flight deck or on either side of the runway. As the deck pendant and the purchase cable are pulled out by the aircraft being arrested, the kinetic energy of the aircraft is transferred to mechanical energy of the cables, and the arresting engine transfers the mechanical energy of the cables to hydraulic energy.