Prestwick Airport is unlikely to see the likes of Lieutenant Commander James Light too often.

"Swashbuckling" might be the best way to describe the US Navy pilot as he strides into the small airport departure lounge and announces himself as our ride to the $6.4bn (£4.9bn) USS George H W Bush.

Confident and "all American", almost to the point of caricature, he describes "the Break", a method of arriving on the boat that involves "a nice smooth 2G pull" before an "arrested landing".

In layman's terms it means wire ropes are going to catch our plane when we hit the flight deck at more than 100mph, preventing us shooting off the other end into the North Atlantic.

"Everyone wanna do the Break?" he asks. We nod - some more enthusiastically than others.

"All players today," he replies, smiling. "I like it."

When we touch down in the North Atlantic an hour later we really do feel the bone crunching impact.

But there is barely time to recover before the back doors are thrown open and the noise of screaming engines rushes in, accompanied by the smell of jet fuel.

Disentangling ourselves from the seat straps but still wearing the life preservers, helmets, headphones and masks, we jump down on to the deck.

A few moments to glance around this floating fortress - one of the world's largest aircraft carriers - before we are ushered below deck.

We have stepped right into the middle of Operation Saxon Warrior, a massive joint military exercise being undertaken by US and UK forces.

It involves warships from five different nations in total as well as submarines, more than 100 aircraft and 9000 military personnel.

Back at Faslane Naval Base on the Clyde, training staff play a supporting role, but that seems a long way off right now.

We are ploughing through the open sea, a fair bit north of Ireland and west of Scotland, accompanied by smaller boats bobbing in the distance and with the clatter and buzz of helicopters overhead.

One of the key parts of the mission is US and UK pilots and personnel working together.

This boat is returning from the front-line in the fight against ISIS and for the pilots these past few months have no doubt been filled with grave threats.

The British airmen and women and sailors who have now joined them on board want to be fully equipped in this death-defying art by the time the Royal Navy's new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, comes into service.

So they practise again and again and again. As the fighter jets roar into the sky one by one they are learning from the American aces.

Amid that focused attention, the smokey and thundering flight deck is a serious and dangerous place but below we find a more relaxed atmosphere.

Inside the cavernous hangar deck young, smiling US naval personnel are waiting to go to work on one of the multi-million dollar planes.

There is something approaching a campus atmosphere as the sound of the American band Fountains of Wayne blares from a small PA system nearby - their hit song Stacey's Mom.

In this age of media management, press officers from both US and UK Navy are with us most of the time.

It is understandable considering given the sensitivity of the mission and the constant physical hazards and the bombs and missiles piled high round every corner.

Nobody here is going to tell you what they did or did not do to shape or influence the situation in the skies over Iraq and Syria these past few months - and with good reason.

Open conversations with sailors and servicemen and women are not only permitted, however, but encouraged.

British personnel are keen to tell us how grateful they are to their American colleagues who have essentially loaned them a multi-billion dollar warship to play with.

Weirdly, more than one sailor describes the dance of the planes up top as something akin to a ballet.

The Americans stationed on this boat are serving perhaps the most controversial commander-in-chief in living memory but they are here to do a job and won't be drawn on politics.

We quiz one senior US Navy Officer about President Donald Trump's controversial announcement he intends to ban Transgender people from serving in the US military.

The officer looks across the giant flight deck at the super-fit and highly trained figures working purposefully in the hazy distance.

Each one could be a man or a woman he tells us. From this distance you cannot even determine.

Instead he says they will continue to judge each person on their skills and abilities, until they are directly ordered not to.

Back on the flight deck more fighter planes are blasting into the sky, the sheer physical force from each one threatening to send STV cameraman Ross Leary over the edge and into the ocean as he leans forward to capture the pictures.

We are both worried the heat is beginning to melt his shoes into the deck. But our time on board is nearly up.

The process of getting back off this thing is a whole new adventure in itself.

We are loaded back into the C2 Greyhound carrier, 15 or 20 of us, trussed up in safety gear with helmets and goggles again, tied to the backwards facing seats and asked to adopt something similar to the "brace, brace" position you might have heard about on a civilian aircraft.

There is only one way to launch a plane this size from a runway this short - and so once the aircraft doors are shut we are duly backed into what can only be described as an enormous catapult or giant rubber band.

The pilot guns the engines to absolute maximum capacity, it pounds through us for about 20 seconds, and then the slingshot is released.

We go from zero to a 160mph in two to three seconds, zoom off the end of the ship, yards from sea and in the general direction of Scotland... then, mercifully, airborne.

We are safely on the way home although the blood has drained entirely from my face and my stomach has been left about a thousand feet behind us.