Objectives  To improve the deck handling efficiency of carrier-borne aircraft, a study of rapid handling routes and scheduling schemes is carried out.

  Methods  A fast planning method of deck handling routes based on network topology is established, and a simulation model is developed on the basis of an aircraft kinematic model and line-of-sight control method. Taking typical launching and recovery operations as examples, the carrier-borne aircraft deck handling constraints, principles and optimization objectives are discussed, and a rapid optimization method for deck handling scheduling is proposed.

  Results  The simulation results show that the optimized algorithm can significantly shorten the total deck handling time of aviation operations, and the performance of the optimized deck handling scheme is close to the US Navy Surge Operation data from 1997.

  Conclusions  A reasonable carrier-borne aircraft deck handling scheme can be obtained quickly using the proposed method, which is of reference value for research into carrier-borne aircraft sortie capability and human-machine deck handling scheme decision-making.