The Viking did look like it was high coming in, but it was hard to tell with the telephoto camera's if that was out of proportion.
I guess the propellor driven aircraft based on the carrier (E2C Hawkeye) must be the easiest to land.
My cousin is married to a former REO on a F-14 Tomcat. On one takeoff, the pilot forgot to put down the flaps, and they went down before they went up after launch. Supposedly my cousin's husband was mad at the pilot for forgetting and it was an apparently a "close one".
That's extremely difficult to do in today's Navy. There are officers on the deck whose job it is to spot anything amiss about the aircraft before it is cleared to go. Any aircraft on the cat with zero degrees flaps is going to get noticed, big time. Perhaps the incident in question involved not ENOUGH flaps, but I seriously doubt that they would launch an F-14 with no flaps deployed and someone didn't catch it. That's just one of the really obvious things.
Michael
Does your cousin know Kevin Cronin? You mean RIO.