From the obituary of Commander Pat Jackson:

Jackson learned to fly in Tiger Moths, and flew from the carriers Argus, Ark Royal and Furious before joining Victorious. He was already assessed as an above-average pilot, and he himself said that he “never found deck-landings much of a problem as I drive my car faster than I land a Swordfish”.

which I thought was a pretty good description of one of the scarier things one can do in this life, make a carrier landing. This cracked me up, the comment at the end:

As Jackson flew down through the cloud for a low-level attack, his observer Lieutenant “Dapper” Berrill tapped him on the shoulder to wish him Happy Birthday. Bismarck’s greeting was a heavy barrage of flak which shook his flimsy aircraft, filled the cockpit with the stench of burning explosives and drenched him with walls of water thrown up by the battleship’s main armament.
Amid the confusion and violent manoeuvring, Jackson thought he saw a torpedo hit Bismarck’s starboard side, but, he confessed later, he “was not brave enough to wait and see”.
After landing on Victorious’s pitching deck in the dark amid a heavy storm, he snatched a few hours’ rest, then took off again to search northwards for the battleship, which intelligence wrongly suggested was heading towards Norway. Meanwhile, Victorious was ordered south to cover any attempt by Bismarck to reach Brest.
After a sortie of five hours, Jackson found himself lost and out of fuel; he had just said three Hail Marys when Berrill pointed to an empty ship’s lifeboat lying partly-sunk below them. Landing on the water about 20 yards away from it, the two men bailed out the lifeboat with their flying boots until there was enough freeboard to climb inside to shelter from the freezing wind.
The lifeboat, from the Dutch tanker Elusa, was well-equipped, and, after bringing up their breakfasts, Jackson and Berrill revived themselves with tots of vintage brandy. Jackson then rigged a mast and sail, hacking the blade off an oar with a rusty axe to make a gaff; once the lifeboat had heeled over and took steerage way, they headed east for Iceland, running before gale force winds.
Four sleepless nights later, Jackson hallucinated that the British consul on the Moon was calling him to a hot bath, and Berrill had to restrain him from jumping overboard.
Thereafter he and Berrill took turns massaging each other’s feet while one of them steered; their rations, hard biscuits damaged by sea water, gave them terrible toothache. On the eighth day, the sighting of seabirds and wreckage gave them hope, but on the ninth the weather worsened so that the sails started to split.
Then, from the crest of a wave, Jackson saw a fishing vessel. As he fired off his last Very flare, a siren indicated that he had been seen, and burly seamen from the Icelandic Lagerfoss jumped aboard to prise Berrill’s frozen hands off the tiller.
They landed in Reykjavik, returned home, and 10 days later Jackson rejoined his squadron. In London, his mother knew that he was missing but had not worried: after attending a requiem Mass for him and one of his brothers, she had visited a medium who reassured her that “Patrick’s doing what he likes best, sailing”.