I don't get in here very often anymore and just came across your posting.
I very much wanted to try and make a landable player controlled ship, but came to the conclusion that it is not possible (or at least that it was beyond my capabilities). This would have added such a great dimension to online carrier operations, but it was not to be, alas...
The landable area on an AI controlled ship is defined in the ship.cfg file - I tried transferring the data to the aircraft.cfg, but the game does not read it. It may be possible to 'harden' the deck in some other way, but I never found a satisfactory solution.
The other issue is the inaccurate modelling of collisions in CFS 2's online environment. Online, the player-controllable ships are treated by the game as very large aircraft and have a crash bubble extending several hundred feet all around, making it impossible to land on with out exploding before reaching the ship...
When the crash bubble is reduced the damage profile is affected to what I felt was an unworkable degree and, of course, aircraft simply pass through the deck until they reach the limits of the crash bubble or hit the water anyway...
Best of luck with this if you find a way of achieving it. There were some clever guys in CFS1's H_Squad who I think made a helicopter landable player-controlled CFS1 PT Gunboat - used to be at www.navyair.com, but can now be found at http://www.hsquad.org/
Never tried it and don't know how (or if!) they made the landing surfaces 'hard' during online play - but it might give you some ideas.
All the best,
Pads
