Shooter Stu

This seems to be my go to video lately, Shooter Stu. A shooter from the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), part of the team responsible for launching planes off a carrier deck. There is just something soothing about watching this ballet of purposeful actions. In the noisy arena of carrier flight operations, visual communications, by what look like seemingly exaggerated hand signals, are important because one cannot hear each other speak.

At the 1:50 mark there are captions to describe what each person is actually doing. After the hook up is confirmed by the sailor in green and control is passed to the shooter, he calls for full power then after saluting the pilot and prior to touching the deck and pointing towards the bow of the ship, he points to each observer at the different ends of the plane to see if they have their thumbs up, signifying that they see no problem on their end.