Is is possible to land a midsize commercial plane on an Ford Class aircraft carrier?
A Classic 737's maximum landing weight is about 114,000# for a -300, less for a -500, more for a -400.  But that is max. Down to &quot;almost empty&quot; gas tanks, knock another 8 or 10,000# off of that. Less than full pax/cargo load, several more thousand pounds off.
With a stiff breeze, say 20 knots, plus the carrier at max speed, you have maybe 50 knots of headwind. With that sort of headwind, can you stop a mid- to light-weight 737 in 1000' using full flaps, max reverse, and max brakes?
I don't have the charts with me, but I suspect you totally could, and in fact it wouldn't even be all that close. No margin for error if equipment fails, but if everything works right, those jets can stop quite well. And 50 knots on the beak is a LOT of headwind... &quot;groundspeed&quot; over the deck would be like 60 or 70 knots, and you can lose that in a lot less than 1000'.
I've flown C-130's and 737's, and the rate of descent on an assault landing in the Herk is nothing the 737 couldn't handle.
So... carrier landing... good to go?
Not so sure.  Compared to carrier aircraft, the 737 wingspan in WIDE -- even for the &quot;little&quot; -500.  That limits where you can plan your rollout so that you don't have an unacceptably high risk of clipping the island. Without playing with scale drawings of a 737 and the Ford's deck, I couldn't even guess if or how the geometry would or wouldn't work out.
Alternate plan that is probably no more risky for the passengers and might be a LOT safer for the carrier: ditch your (nearly out of fuel) jet close to the carrier, and have the carrier's helos and the small boats of the battle group pull the survivors off the wings or out of the water. With calm water, you get a &quot;Sully&quot; scenario (except with wings filled mostly with air, rather than jet fuel... Better buoyancy). In rough water, the risks go up. Way up.
But in that sort of weather, the deck landing gets lots more risky as well.
I suspect the deck landing would neither be allowed nor requested, but not for reasons of stopping performance.