My first job out of college was with a large consulting company who at the time was the sole (and may remain as such) designers of both the steam catapults and the hydraulic arresting gear.
The guys that worked in that group said that a good operator could lay a dime on the deck at the point the nose wheel of the incoming aircraft would stop---and then prove it!
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis