Why are all the sailors so colourful on the flight deck? Each role has its own colour to help them do their job efficiently. Watch to find out!
Synopsis
Ever wondered why these warship sailors wear different coloured jerseys and cranials on the flight deck? A hundred years ago, when the US Navy’s first aircraft carrier USS Langley set sail, the sailors created a colour-coded system to ensure order and safety on the flight deck. In today’s navy, our Allied sailors still use this colour-coded system to conduct flight operations efficiently on a warship.
Filmed during exercise Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 2023, and including footage from other US carriers engaged in different exercises with NATO Allies, this video shows how this simple – and colourful – system helps smooth out operations and tasks on deck. During BALTOPS, the USS carrier Mount Whitney trained with NATO Allies and partners large-scale maritime and amphibious operations in the Baltic Sea.
Transcript
—SOUNDBITE IN ENGLISH—
Caroline Logan,
US Navy Aviation Electrician’s Mate (AE2)
Hi, I'm Caroline Logan and I'm an Aviation Electrician's Mate Second Class in the United States Navy. And today I'm going to be explaining the colours of the jerseys and the cranials that we wear.
— TEXT ON SCREEN —
SINCE THE 1920s THE US NAVY
USES COLOUR-CODED JERSEYS
TO ENSURE ORDER AND SAFETY
ON THE FLIGHT DECK
—SOUNDBITE IN ENGLISH—
Caroline Logan,
US Navy Aviation Electrician’s Mate (AE2)
First, we have green jerseys, which are the people who maintain the aircraft. Maintenance, we have quite a few different rates. I'm an electrician.
We have “air framers”, who work on the structure of the aircraft.
We have “power plants”, who are mechanics on the engines and the rotor heads.
We have blue shirts, who are the people who do chocks and chains, which are the little orange things on the wheels that keep the aircraft from rolling.
Purple shirts are “fuelies”, who fuel the aircraft, so when we refuel the helicopter, they take a fuel sample every 24 hours or every time that they fuel, and they shake the bottle to look for debris and water in the fuel sample to make sure we're not putting that in the aircraft.
White shirts are QA, which is quality assurance, and safety or medical and red shirts are crash and salvage in case there were a fire in startup or shutdown. The yellow shirts are the LSE (Landing Signal Enlisted), the people who launch the aircraft off the deck.
The plane captain will start up the aircraft until the rotors are online and then the LSE will take over and launch it from the ship.
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