Naval Aviator Pulls Off Spectacular Take-Off At The Dead Of Night

Carrier operations are a mind-numbingly complex arrangement of technologies and procedures. Naval aviators spend years learning to fly, learning to employ an aircraft as a weapon, then learning to wield that weapon from a heaving piece of floating steel hundreds of miles from land. The lessons are written in blood. They are studied with reverence.

Day operations and low-visibility night operations are two different games. This awesome footage shows a naval fighter MiG-29K taking off from an aircraft carrier in the dead of night.

It’s dark—scary dark. Like when you are five years old hiding under the covers to avoid monsters dark. There might be a few stars in the sky and maybe a partial moon above a thick layer of clouds near the ocean floor. But below the cloud deck is just a vast expanse of black ocean.

Flying at night over the open ocean as a naval aviator has a certain haunting loneliness to it that only a few people have experienced. The critical task of taking off a multi-million dollar aircraft from a moving vessel belongs only to you. It is a lonely task and aviator does it meticulously. His bravery and boldness while taking off this powerful aircraft is the ultimate in excellency. It is so dark that we can’t see anything in the video, yet alone this pilot. We can only hear the sound of the engines getting ready to help this plane fly high. All of a sudden, right in front of our eyes, there goes the aircraft, zooming and buzzing in the air. Everything is done before we bat an eyelash. What a powerful footage this is!