Aircraft Carrier Question

[rcaf_777]

This just came to me

North American Rockwell OV-10 Bronco

"With the second seat removed, it can carry 3,200 pounds of cargo, five paratroopers or two litter patients and an attendant"

[Gelrir]

Lots of STOL aircraft would be able to land on a modern carrier deck without needing arrester cables.

http://youtu.be/pUdzVnZBaoY

http://youtu.be/kEb74IquE1A

The sort of planes that can land on Alaskan rivers (Super Cub, Pilatus Porter for example) would find even a WW2 escort carrier not too hard to operate from.

--
Michael B.

[stormlion1]

Another option is to carry helicopters instead. I wonder how many Black Hawks or Ospreys a Essex could handle

[Matt Wiser]

Okay....my cousin Jacqui is a USN carrier aviator (she flies F/A-18Es). I've relayed the question to her, and should have a reply in a day or two.

[mpipes]

She could carry the Harrier II, A-4s and F-8s for certain, since she had the SCB-27C conversion same as Oriskany. Also AH-1Ws and any other helicopter. Maybe A-10s. She also had the storage and handling facilities for nukes.

[kalos72]

What about older civilian types like a Cessna 306 or something...170

[dragoon500ly]

Okay....my cousin Jacqui is a USN carrier aviator (she flies F/A-18Es). I've relayed the question to her, and should have a reply in a day or two.

At its heyday, the Lady Lex had an air group of roughly 80 aircraft (Korea). Her last air group before conversion into a training carrier consisted of two squadrons of S-2 Tracker ASW fixed-wing aircraft and a squadronof SH-3 Sea King ASW helos, all told about 45 aircraft.

[Sanjuro]

Any of the Cessna 150-172 series would have no problem size-wise landing on even an Invincible-size deck; my personal best in a 152 was 64 paces (my stride probably wasn't quite a metre) with about a 10-15 knot wind. Most light singles would be ok, non-STOL twins would need the carrier to be augmenting the headwind.
The big difficulty would be training non-carrier pilots to get used to a moving runway.

[Gelrir]

The Doolittle Raid used 16 B-25 aircraft; the first aircraft (Doolittle's own) had only 142 meters of deck to use.

--
Michael B.

[Matt Wiser]

Okay....got a reply from my cousin the Super Bug driver. She says that if you had an Essex, then any aircraft landing will need a tailhook. Period. A Forrestal-class or larger, a WW II warbird, or a light aircraft like a Cessna 182 or a Beech Bonanza, would be able to land, but you'd need to be precise on the approach, because you'd need pretty much all the angled deck to land. To launch, you need 25 knots of wind over the deck, and they did that when the WW II warbirds launched off of Carl Vinson for the 1995 VJ-Day anniversary, or the two B-25s off of Ranger for the 1992 anniversary of the Doolittle Raid.

WW II arrestor hooks are too narrow for today's ships, though.

[stormlion1]

I wonder how much of a refit it would take to install the proper gear. Or would it be better to try to dig up older Cold War era planes the carrier was refitted to carry back in the 60's. Texas isn't all that far from Davis-Monthan they might have some older Naval Birds that could be salvaged for use.

[mpipes]

In the 90s, there were still lots of F-8s at Davis-Monthan and there are likely still dozens of A-4s there.

As I see things developing, A/C loses would be critical by April at least for everyone. The boneyards would have been refurbishing and returning airframes to service as fast as possible. by May at the latest. Lexington would most likely been operating F-8s, A-4, Harriers, and maybe S-2s as well as any helicopters still able to fly. I have her with an airwing of 8xF-8H, 10xA-4G, 6xHarrier II, 5xUH-60 LAMPs III, 3xS-2s, and 12xAH-1W in the Gulf of Mexico in early 1998.

[Gelrir]

Here's the video of C130 landings on the Forrestal:

http://youtu.be/ar-poc38C84

Needs a lot more distance for the takeoff than for the landing, in fact.

An important function of arrested landings: you get to use a lot more of the deck for other stuff (marshalling aircraft, takeoffs, etc.). If you don't have arresting equipment, you probably don't want to spot planes on deck during landings, even with the angled flight deck.

--
Michael B.

[Olefin]

I definitely agree on the boneyard aircraft being available by later in the war - at least until the Mexicans overran Davis Monthan - so the question is how much of a priority would the carrier planes have been with the need to get things like stored Phantoms, B-52's, etc.. back up to speed to replace air losses in Europe, Iran and Korea

I can see at least some F-8's and A-4's for sure but would any have been left in the US for the Lex or would they have been sent overseas immediately

[raketenjagdpanzer]

I would imagine by late in the war (1998) before things went completely to shit you'd see A1 Skyraiders pulled out of stocks and refurbed for carrier duty, if not land duty. The OV-10 Bronco flew as late as DS; could the A37 Dragonfly do carrier ops