1 Of Life's Many Questions Answered

Here Is What All Those Colored Shirts Mean On An Aircraft Carrier's Deck

Yellow:

• Yellow shirts are worn by aircraft handlers and aircraft directors that shuttle aircraft around the carrier’s tight and chaotic deck. Catapult Officers and Arresting Gear Officers also wear yellow shirts. Because yellow shirts are so involved with taxiing aircraft, they are often featured prominently in dramatic photos depicting carrier deck operations.

Green:

• Green shirts are worn by some of the hardest-working sailors on the deck, including ones who run and maintain the ship’s catapults and arresting gear. Hook Runners who make sure the ship’s cross-deck pendants (wires) make it back into position to trap another aircraft by coercing them with a five-foot steel bar wear green shirts. This is one of the most dangerous positions on the flight deck as the wires can snap across the deck at high speed, slicing through whatever or whoever they come in contact with.

Blue:

• Plane Handlers, who work under the direction of the yellow shirt wearing aircraft handlers, assist in moving aircraft around the deck. They also can operate the carrier’s massive aircraft elevators, drive tractors and work as messengers and verbal liaisons.

Purple:

• Purple shirts, better known as “Grapes,” are all about aviation fuels. They fuel and de-fuel the carrier’s aircraft, often on very tight schedules. Obviously, pumping fuel at high-pressure into jets loaded with explosives and full of hot electronics and mechanical devices is not exactly a low-risk proposition. One spark, caused by grounding issue or one of many other possibilities, could cause a real disaster.

Red:

• The red color is no mistake as the crewmen that wear this color are usually near very hazardous things or situations. Ordnancemen deal with building, moving and mounting weapons and arming the air wing’s aircraft. They use their own hardened elevators to move live bombs and missiles up to the deck before loading them on the aircraft, which can including literally lining up and heaving a 500 pound missile over their shoulders to get it attached to the aircraft’s weapons station.

Brown:

• Brown shirts are worn most notably by Plane Captains. Loosely equivalent to a Crew Chief in the Air Force, Plane Captains are responsible for overseeing the maintenance, launch and recovery and general well-being of their aircraft as well as the others in their squadron. The old adage is the plane captain is the one who truly “owns the jet,” and the pilot just borrows it for a couple hours at a time.

White:

• White shirts are worn by a fairly wide mix of deck crew. These include many quality and safety observers such as air wing quality control personnel, individual squadron plane inspectors, and safety observers. Yet probably most well known white shirt wearers are Landing Signal Officers (LSOs) who help talk down approaching aircraft while also making sure the deck is clear for their arrival. The LSOs are sourced from each squadron in the air wing and are usually pilots with historically high landing scores themselves.

(Jalopnik.com)