U.S. Aircraft Carriers

An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations. They have evolved from wooden vessels used to deploy balloons into nuclear-powered warships that carry dozens of fixed wing and rotary-wing aircraft.

Aircraft carriers are typically treated as the capital ship of a fleet and are extremely expensive to build and important to protect: of the nine nations which possess an aircraft carrier, seven of these navies only possess one such ship. There are 20 active aircraft carriers in the world, with the U.S. Navy operating 11 out of the total as of June 2011.

The typical air wing aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier usually contains three FA-18 squadrons,  one S-3 squadron, one EA-6B squadron, one E-2C squadron, and one helicopter squadron. You can find detailed information on each of these aircraft by clicking on the silhouette. That will take you to the Navy Fact File for that particular aircraft.

As "runways at sea," modern aircraft carriers have a flat-top deck design that serves as a flight deck for the launch and recovery of aircraft. Aircraft are launched in a forward direction, into the wind, and recovered from astern. Carriers steam at speed, for example up to 35 knots (65 km/h), into the wind during flight deck operations in order to increase the wind over the deck to exceed a safe minimum. This increase in effective wind speed provides a higher launch airspeed for aircraft at the end of the catapult stroke or ski-jump, plus it makes recovery safer by reducing the difference between the relative speeds of the aircraft and ship.

On CATOBAR carriers, a steam-powered catapult is used to accelerate conventional aircraft to a safe flying speed by the end of the catapult stroke, after which the aircraft is airborne and further propulsion is provided by its own engines. On STOVL or STOBAR carriers aircraft do not require catapult assistance for take off; instead an upwards vector is provided by a ski-jump at the forward end of the flight deck. Which form of assistance provided is dependent on aircraft design and performance and is part of the overall design of the carrier and aircraft as a system.

Conversely, when recovering onto a CATOBAR or STOBAR carrier, conventional aircraft rely upon a tailhook that catches on arrestor wires stretched across the deck to bring them to a stop in a short distance. Helicopters and V/STOL (Vertical/Short Take-Off and Landing) aircraft usually recover by coming abreast the carrier on the port side and then using their hover capability to move over the flight deck and land vertically without the need for arresting gear.

Conventional ("tailhook") aircraft rely upon a landing signal officer (LSO, sometimes called "paddles") to monitor the plane's approach, visually gauge glideslope, attitude, and airspeed, and transmit that data to the pilot. Before the angled deck emerged in the ...