Depends. Upon what you're flying, what you're landing upon, and as often as not what colors they are flying. We generally went starboard to port on small decks, but sometimes port to starboard, depending upon wind and sea combination. We were underpowered and had decks the size of matchbooks, so unless you had a lot of clear wind across the deck, if a donk quit, you were going to the deck or you were going swimming.
Established to port with little wind in a hover? For us, that would have been dangerous luxury. Looking back, however, we did quite a few dumb things, and many of them were actual written procedures.
You'd try to get the ship to give you that 330 relative wind, but sometimes they couldn't do it, or couldn't do it and stay within pitch & roll limits, or couldn't do it without running aground or whatever, so sometimes you'd get a starboard wind, or a following sea, or some other dodgy combination of things. And of course since about 9 times of 10 you had no alternate, you figured out how to get aboard.
Once you'd decided the ship was about as OK as it was likely to get during this bag of fuel, you'd set up a nice closure rate, hitting a transition point about 200' above deck height, 60 KIAS more or less, 1200-1500' back, the speed and distance depending somewhat upon windspeed.
On short final, the center of your field of view was the big white landing spot, and you didn't want to be forward of the lateral line unless you were interested in putting blades into the superstructure. You sort of aim for the median of what the landing spot is doing, basically disregarding pitch & roll (it's basically noise if it's within limits) but paying heed to heave and yaw (of the ship), because heave will smack you in the undercarriage, or drop away from you, and if you chase it then it will really smack you in the undercarriage. Yaw, of course, cleverly tries to move the landing spot out from under you like a linen yanked from a laden table. There's a rather fine line between a firm landing in a seaway and rattling the crewman's fillings.
It's more easily shown than described. Night wasn't much different, except closure rate was more fidgety, and it was easy to fixate on the moving deck, which as it began to dawn on one that was what one was doing became definitely an unpleasant experience.
If you had a Talon or Harpoon (same thing, different name), and the ship was so equipped, if you hit the grid, you were apples, if you didn't, you'd have to wait at negative pitch until some slightly mad teenagers came out under the disk and tied you down.
RAST is something else entirely. So was getting aboard on instruments. You haven't lived until you've shot an ELVA for real and crawled up the ship's wake figuring there was likely a ship at the end of it.
Of course, I'm inclined to believe a friend of mine (who is in a position to know) who says you haven't lived until you've improvised an instrument approach to Matthewtown, Great Inagua direction-finding on a FM-equipped taxicab parked at the runway threshold in hard IFR (he tipped the guy all the money the entire crew had).
For us, the only mandatory command from the deck was "wave-off", everything else advisory.
Every organization I've run across (and that's a few) does it differently. We used enough people to cast a Cecil B. DeMille epic (overkill in my view), but the Royal Navy corvette I once landed on for a meeting (with a gigantic grid on a balmy day, bless 'em) we had to shut down and wander up to the bridge to find anyone at all (we had spoken with them over the radio, so they knew we were indeed coming, and when). Upon entering the pilothouse the Captain smiled winningly and said: "Ah! So you're here, then! Tea or coffee?"
Last edited by Um... lifting...; 20th Jul 2011 at 15:28.