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Considering how tough the Eagle is.

I'd seen stills, but couldn't believe the thing could actually fly like that. Designing an aircraft to fly one-winged would certainly be possible, but one would have to get a lot of torque from control surfaces to compensate. I'm surprised the pilot didn't notice that something was severely unbalanced.

Also, what sort of braking mechanisms do landing cables use? I would think they'd have a drag mechanism to prevent them from ripping out the tailhook.

Designing an aircraft to fly one-winged would certainly be possible, but one would have to get a lot of torque from control surfaces to compensate. I'm surprised the pilot didn't notice that something was severely unbalanced.

The Germans apparently played around with asymmetrical designs during World War II. There, you had the spin of the props to offset the imbalance, but it apparently turned out to be easier than they thought.

Ground based arresting cables are pretty simple because they can pay out quite a distance getting the aircraft stopped. Most have a rotary hydraulic engine that slows things down. The tough part for damaged aircraft is that they often must use landing speeds in excess of the engagement speed of the gear. That usually means passing up the approach end gear and hoping for the long field gear. Personally, I wish more military fields had midfield gear for situations like that.

Some over run gear at the end of runways is meant simply to slow aircraft going into the overrun. That gear can be as simple as a bunch of chain buried in the ground.

The arresting gear on carriers is much more complex because it must slow the aircraft to a stop in a much shorter distance as the aircraft is adding full power, in case it misses the wires. The cable you see on the flight deck is just the center 100 feet and the rest is connected to a huge set of pulleys dampened by a piston hydraulic engine. It looks like a huge horizontal block and tackle arrangement with the cable running back and forth a bunch of times between two massive pulleys. As the landing aircraft arrives behind the boat for landing, the type of aircraft is called to the arresting gear crew to set the max trap weight for that type of aircraft.