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Fairey III-F aircraft landing on board British Aircraft Carrier HMS Furious circa the early 1930s; Arresting gear wires are visible above the flight deck.

Arresting gear is a term for any system designed to decelerate an aircraft as it lands, particularly on board aircraft carriers. Old landbase systems used wire ropes with sand bags at the end, modern landbase systems often use ropes connected to electro-magnetic brakes systems or air brakes systems.

On aircraft carriers, the system consists of an oil hydraulic cylinder with two rows of alluminium wire rope sheaves connected to the body of the hydraulic cylinder and 2 rows of alluminium wire rope sheaves connected to the piston rod of the hydraulic cylinder. These rows are monted in a head that moves horizontally in a frame. The cylinder is hydraulically connected to a pressure vessel via a special valve. Over the sheaves a wire rope is reeved and one piece of this cable is going over the deck. A landing aircraft has to catch this wire rope and this wire rope subsequently compresses the hydraulic cylinder. The hydraulic oil is throttled by a valve into the pressure vessel. Over the deck of these aircraft some four or five wire cables (belonging to four or five arresting gear engines) are waiting for the aircraft, the last one being a barrier with a net. The systems of the U.S. navy basically did not change for decades, because of the spare parts policy of the Navy. The arrestor gear engines of the French carrier "Charles de Gaulle" are identical to the US ones.

Examples include:

• Arrestor cables, which are caught by an aircraft's tailhook.
• Arrestor nets, which brake an aircraft by catching the aircraft's fuselage and wings in an elastic net.
• Less commonly, foam, dirt, or mud pits at the end of a runway, which brake an aircraft by catching the landing gear and slowing it down by friction. The current commercial standard system is known as EMAS for Engineered Material Arresting System.

Link to land-based aircraft arresting gear: http://www.esco.zodiac.com