Ready room

A ready room is a room on an aircraft carrier where on-duty pilots "stand by" their airplanes. Each flight squadron has its own individual ready room. Large squadrons, such as torpedo and dive-bomber squadrons, can have more than one ready room. Most ready rooms are located between the flight and hangar decks, but some are located on the flight deck.

Squadron pilots in the Second World War considered the ready room to be a clubroom. One personal view from a World War II pilot stated:

The funny thing about a ready room is that you get attached to the hole. As much as you are attached to the ship. It's more than sentiment. It's an urge for protection. The loneliest feeling in the whole of a carrier pilot's world is when he's at sea with the gas running low, and he can't see his carrier. You think of the ready room then, and the noisy guys who make it the most desirable place in the world. It's your office, you live in it, it is the big thing in your life. […] You sweat and worry in it, and grouse and argue, and you get mad at it when you can't hear yourself speak because everyone is yelling at once, but you're deeply attached to the place.

The typical ready room is equipped as follows:

The ready room personnel comprises:

Also to be found in ready rooms are pilots' flying gear, including parachute harnesses, flight jackets, and helmets, ready for the pilots to put on when they leave for their aeroplanes; and assorted maps and to-scale models (of targets and of enemy ships and aircraft).

One WW2 report describes the material used by the intelligence officers in a ready room as follows:

The Captain's table was littered with a bewildering array. There were encyclopedias, Baedekers, French tourist guides, copies of the National Geographic magazine, and piles of photographs.

One humorous memorandum by a pilot on the USS Wasp (CV-18) had this to say of the Wasp's ticker tape:

When you first man your ready rooms, you will note a large screen known as a teletype. Learn to ignore this immediately. The information given on it is about as fresh as an 1873 edition of the New York Times. In between numerous erasures you will find given a point option undoubtedly used by Commodore Perry on his way to Japan in 1853. Certainly it won't apply to your present operations.

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