I am really interested in many things, but specially on those that are not a part of my daily work, but show an interesting way to reach an idea ; a bit what some call the sciences of design, but also a bit of the joy of changing the view looking at things as seriously as the boy who plays.

An angled deck is an aircraft carrier deck with two axis forming an angle, so its use is more efficient for a series of take-offs and landings. It appears after the end of WWII, and in an interesting way, nearly as much as the ideas developed in parallel but finally not adopted. On one side, jets are heavier and operate at higher speeds than previous navy planes, so some even propose flexible decks so planes could land without landing gears, so reducing their weight; on the other side there is a clear problem of space on such reduced decks, so airplane circulation has to be regulated as to ensure an adequate reaction speed. The angled deck allows to have two runways whose effective length is more than the addition of their individual lengths.

An interesting evolution of what in the end is a design problem base on which are the limits to how compact can a system used by different kinds of objects be, from the original idea of aircraft carrier, apparently first formulated by Clement Ader

The story, told by Hone, Friedman and Mandeles, deserves to be read, as it is an example of how to get to a simple concept through complex ways.