- Edited
First a little background on myself, I spent 10 years in the Navy, 6 of those on the USS Ranger CV-61. I worked on the Fresnel Lens Optical Landing System which is the stabilized glide slope indicator ("the ball") pilots look at when landing. I worked in the same division that the catapults and arresting gear folks worked. If used properly they should hook the #3 arresting gear cable (there are 4 total). This video :
shows an E-2C Hawkeye landing and the arresting gear cable parting. That this pilot was able to recover that was a miracle. Not enough resolution on the video to tell where the cable parted. The part of the cable that lays across the flight deck is called the cross deck pendant and is replaced every 100 "hits". Parting of that cable should be and is extremely rare. The story says 8 crewmembers were injured but it doesn't say how many of those were aircrew and how many were flight deck personnel. That cable snapping back can be deadly. Arresting gear cable weighs, IIRC, somewhere around 15 lbs per foot. While I was on the Ranger we took a couple of barricade recoveries and saw a dumbshit EA-6B pilot drop a $30M plane into the ocean because he forgot to set flaps for a recovery but never saw that. Those aircrew owe that pilot their lives.
