Speaking of Catapult Launches - Here's an Athwartship Launch of a Hellcat from the Hornet

You’d have to be real confident of your abilities, or downright crazy to do that.

Interesting short piece. Some thoughts:

(1) The article talks about launching scout planes, presumably the relatively light scout planes like battleships and cruisers could launch. But the airplanes shown are larger / heavier combat aircraft.

(2) What makes carrier air operations work relatively well is that you turn into a 20 kt wind and work the carrier up to 30 kts, so you have 50 kts over the wings with the airplane standing still relative to the flight deck. Remember the film of the Dootlittle raid, where it looks like the bombers are going so slowly when they take off? They could probably take off going only about 40 kts relative to the flight deck. But when you launch out the side of the carrier doing other air operations, you're launching into a 50 kt crosswind!

I bet the throttle on those planes is bent from being shoved against the forward stop.

I built ship models for a time when I was a kid and those athwartship* catapults and planes always seemed crazy to me even as a ~12yo.

*learned a new word today

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I guess the advantage would be having a plane always ready to launch while keeping the flight deck clear. AFAIK the newer Essex class didn't have this so they must have decided they didn't need it.