Aircraft carrier

• 1. Introduction

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  The aircraft carrier is the largest weapon system ever created. At 100,000 tonnes and over a thousand feet long, a single ship carries dozens of fighters, helicopters, and strike aircraft. It can project military power anywhere on Earth without asking permission from any nation, without trespassing on any sovereign territory, and without relying on a single runway on foreign soil. Henry Kissinger, while serving as United States Secretary of State, captured something essential about these vessels when he said: "An aircraft carrier is 100,000 tons of diplomacy." Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, former First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, put it plainly from the other direction: "To put it simply, countries that aspire to strategic international influence have aircraft carriers." How did warships become this central to global power? The answer begins in 1910 with a Curtiss Pusher airplane and a cruiser anchored off the coast of Virginia.

• 2. From Balloons to Flight Decks

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  Eugene Burton Ely made the first experimental takeoff of a fixed-wing airplane from a warship on the 14th of November 1910, lifting off from a United States Navy cruiser anchored off Norfolk Navy Base in Virginia. Two months later, on the 18th of January 1911, he landed a Curtiss Pusher airplane on a platform fitted to an armored cruiser anchored in San Francisco Bay. Then, on the 9th of May 1912, Commander Charles Samson of the Royal Naval Air Service flew a Short Improved S.27 biplane from the deck of a Royal Navy battleship while the ship was underway, providing the first practical demonstration that carrier aviation could work in actual naval operations. These were acts of genuine improvisation. The aircraft carrier had not yet been invented; the airplane itself was barely a decade old, following the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. Early developments ran in parallel, with France fielding a seaplane tender as far back as 1911. During the First World War, the Imperial Japanese Navy ship Wakamiya conducted what is recorded as the world's first carrier-launched air raid on the 6th of September 1914, using its crane to lower Farman seaplanes into the water before attacking targets in Jiaozhou Bay off Qingdao. The Wakamiya attacked an Austro-Hungarian cruiser and the Imperial German gunboat Jaguar; neither was hit. The idea of a vessel that could carry, launch, and recover aircraft as a repeatable military function still required a breakthrough in engineering. That breakthrough came from a dangerous experiment in a Scottish harbor.

• 3. A Death That Changed the Design

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  Squadron Commander Edwin Harris Dunning landed his Sopwith Pup on HMS Furious in Scapa Flow, Orkney, on the 2nd of August 1917, becoming the first pilot to land an airplane on a moving ship. The manoeuver demanded that he fly around the ship's superstructure to reach the forward flight deck, a technique that was both difficult and dangerous. Dunning was later killed when his airplane was thrown overboard during another landing attempt on Furious. The Navy pressed on, removing Furious's rear turret and adding a second flight deck over a stern hangar. The funnel and superstructure stayed in place, and the turbulence they created was severe enough that only three landing attempts succeeded before further tries were forbidden. The lesson was clear: a carrier needed a flush deck, free of obstructions. By 1918, the result of that hard-won experience was the world's first carrier capable of both launching and recovering naval aircraft. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 then reshaped what got built next. The treaty limited the construction of new heavy surface combat ships, so most early carriers were conversions of hulls already laid down as cruisers, battlecruisers, or battleships. Only by the mid-1920s had several navies begun ordering ships purposefully designed from the keel up as aircraft carriers. Japan commissioned purpose-built carriers including one in 1922 and another in 1924, even though that second ship had been laid down in 1918 before the first was completed.

• 4. World War II: Air Power Transforms the Sea

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  In November 1940, a British carrier launched a long-range strike on the Italian fleet moored at their base in Taranto, incapacitating three of six anchored battleships while losing only two torpedo bombers. It was an announcement that the era of the battleship as the decisive weapon of naval warfare was ending. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, the 7th of December 1941, confirmed the lesson in catastrophic terms for the United States: six Japanese carriers concentrated into a single strike force represented a scale of air power no other navy had attempted. On the 18th of April 1942, the US Navy carrier sailed to within 650 nautical miles of Japan and launched 16 B-25 Mitchell medium bombers in a retaliatory strike that reached the capital, Tokyo. The sheer scale of demand for carrier aviation forced rapid improvisation. Escort carriers, sometimes purpose-built but mostly converted from merchant hulls, were used to provide anti-submarine air cover for convoys and amphibious landings. Light aircraft carriers built from converted cruiser hulls offered the speed of the main fleet in a smaller hull. The UK designed a light fleet carrier in 1942 specifically for rapid construction by civilian shipyards, with an expected service life of about three years. That hull design proved durable enough that it was chosen by nearly all carrier-operating navies after the war, continuing in use until the 1980s. Two carriers, converted from paddle steamers, even operated on the Great Lakes for training duties, making them the only aircraft carriers ever propelled in that way.

• 5. Engineering the Modern Carrier

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  Royal Navy Captain Dennis Cambell invented the angled flight deck after 1945, a response to the higher speeds of jet aircraft that made the straight-deck design genuinely dangerous. The angled deck separated the landing area from the launch area, and it allowed an aircraft that missed the arresting wires to "bolt" and take off again safely rather than crashing into planes parked forward. The first optical landing system was fitted to a carrier in 1952, giving pilots precise glideslope information that paddles and hand signals could not provide. Jet blast deflectors became necessary to protect aircraft and deck handlers from engine exhaust; early versions fitted to wooden-decked carriers in the late 1940s eventually had to be water-cooled as engine power increased. The need for speed above 30 knots to evade nuclear submarines, combined with the growing size and weight of individual aircraft, pushed the largest carriers toward nuclear propulsion. Nuclear reactors power the ship's propulsion, electricity, catapults, and other systems without the need to refuel at sea. The USS Forrestal, launched in 1954, was the first carrier to exceed 80,000 tonnes full-load displacement. USS Enterprise, launched in 1960, was the first over 90,000 tonnes. The USS Nimitz, launched in 1972, crossed 100,000 tonnes. The appellation "supercarrier" is not an official designation in any national navy; the term was first used by The New York Times in 1938 to describe a Royal Navy vessel of 800 feet in length, 22,000 tons of displacement, and a design capacity of 72 aircraft. By the standards of what followed, that ship was modest.

• 6. How Aircraft Get Off the Deck

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  The constraints of a flight deck shorter than any runway on land forced navies into four distinct engineering philosophies. CATOBAR, catapult-assisted take-off with barrier-arrested recovery, uses a steam or electromagnetic catapult to accelerate heavy aircraft to flying speed before the deck runs out. It is the most capable and most expensive method. All CATOBAR carriers in service today are nuclear-powered except China's Fujian. A total of thirteen are in service: ten in the United States, one more US carrier, Fujian in China, and the Charles de Gaulle in France. STOBAR, short take-off with barrier-arrested recovery, uses a ski-jump ramp at the forward end of the deck to convert rolling speed into vertical velocity, giving aircraft a few more seconds to gain lift. Pilots must accept reduced fuel and weapon loads. Five are in service across China, India, and Russia. STOVL, short take-off and vertical landing, relies on aircraft with thrust-vectoring engines. The Hawker Siddeley Harrier and its descendants are the most famous examples, though the Lockheed Martin F-35B now represents a new generation with significantly improved performance. Fourteen carriers using this method are in service. Helicopter carriers form the fourth category, operating only rotary-wing aircraft. The ski-jump ramp was originally developed by the Royal Navy and has since been adopted by many navies for smaller carriers. Russia's Sukhoi Su-33, for instance, can only leave the carrier with a minimal armament and fuel load because of the payload penalty the ski-jump system imposes.

• 7. Vulnerability and Geopolitical Weight

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  Carriers are genuinely vulnerable. They lack the firepower of other warships and require a surrounding group of ships, often called a carrier strike group, to provide protection from enemy submarines, aircraft, and missiles. The diesel-electric German submarine U24 of the conventional 206 class penetrated carrier defenses during the exercise JTFEX 01-2 in the Caribbean Sea in 2001, "firing" at USS Enterprise by shooting flares and photographing the carrier through its periscope. The Swedish Navy submarine Gotland repeated the feat in 2006 during JTFEX 06-2, penetrating the defensive measures of Carrier Strike Group 7. Some military analysts argue that modern anti-ship weapons, including ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, have made carrier groups too exposed for high-intensity combat. Yet carriers continue to multiply. As of a recent count, nine navies operate twenty-four vessels officially designated aircraft carriers or aircraft cruisers. The United States operates eleven nuclear-powered carriers, with combined deck space more than twice that of all other nations combined as of 2016. China operates one catapult-assisted carrier and two ski-jump carriers. The United Kingdom and India each operate two ski-jump carriers. France fields one nuclear-powered carrier. A further twenty-nine vessels worldwide operate with full-length flight decks under other classifications. The USS Gerald R. Ford, at roughly 100,000 tonnes, a length of 337 meters, and commissioned in 2017, is the largest carrier in service, and the first of its class came in as the subject of a cost debate: its price was estimated at $12-14.5 billion, plus $12 billion for development and research, compared to about $2 billion for a 45,000-tonne alternative capable of deploying F-35B squadrons.