Hello everyone, welcome back again with us at Military TV. In this episode, we are going
to discuss a question that made us curious all the time. Why do aircraft carriers have
an angled deck? The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is
the surface from which its aircraft take off and land, essentially a miniature airfield
at sea. On smaller naval ships which do not have aviation as a primary mission, the landing
area for helicopters and other VTOL aircraft is also referred to as the flight deck. The
official U.S. Navy term for these vessels is "air-capable ships".
Flight decks have been in use upon ships since 1910, the American pilot Eugene Ely being
the first individual to take off from a warship. Initially consisting of wooden ramps built
over the forecastle of capital ships, a number of battlecruisers, including the British HMS
Furious and Courageous class, the American USS Lexington and Saratoga, and the Japanese
Akagi and battleship Kaga, were converted to aircraft carriers during the interwar period.
The first aircraft carrier to feature a full-length flight deck, akin to the configuration of
the modern vessels, was the converted liner HMS Argus. The armored flight deck was another
innovation pioneered by the Royal Navy during the 1930s. Early landing arrangements relied
on the low speed and landing speed of the era's aircraft, being simply "caught" by a
team of deck-hands in a fairly hazardous arrangement, but these became impractical as heavier aircraft
with higher landing speeds emerged; thus an arrangement of arrestor cables and tailhooks
soon became the favored approach. Like in this video, The Doolittle Raid incident,
was an air raid by the United States on the Japanese capital Tokyo in World War II that
use the full-length flight deck. During World War II, aircraft would land on
the flight deck parallel to the long axis of the ship's hull. Aircraft which had already
landed would be parked on the deck at the bow end of the flight deck. A crash barrier
was raised behind them to stop any landing aircraft which overshot the landing area because
its landing hook missed the arrestor cables. If this happened, it would often cause serious
damage or injury and even, if the crash barrier was not strong enough, destruction of parked
aircraft. An important development of the early 1950s
was the introduction by the Royal Navy of the angled flight deck by Capt D.R.F. Campbell
RN in conjunction with Lewis Boddington of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough.
The runway was canted at an angle of a few degrees from the longitudinal axis of the
ship. If an aircraft missed the arrestor cables (referred to as a "bolter"), the pilot only
needed to increase engine power to maximum to get airborne again, and would not hit the
parked aircraft because the angled deck pointed out over the sea.
For almost 80 years, the aircraft carrier has been the most powerful warship on the
high seas. Just over six decades ago, the carrier reached a new level of potency when
the angled deck was introduced. Some carriers were re-fitted with it while others were designed
with the advanced tech from the get-go. First, let’s take a look at how carriers
operated in World War II and, to a large extent, in the Korean War. The naval aviation workhorse
of those conflicts, the Essex-class carrier, had a straight-deck design. To deliver some
hurt to the enemy, carriers would launch “deckload” strikes, sending off most of their air group
(in World War II, this consisted of 36 F6F fighters, 36 SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, and
18 TBF Avenger torpedo bombers). Carriers, at the time, could either launch
planes or land them they couldn’t do both at the same time. When launching deckload
strikes of propeller-driven planes, it wasn’t an issue. All planes would leave at once and,
later, all return. When it came time to bring aircraft home, the propeller planes were easy
to stop they were light and slow relatively to the jets that had just started to come
online. The use of jets off aircraft carriers changed
things, the F9F Panthers were faster and heavier than the World War II-era piston-engine fighters.
It is easy to see how a jet that misses the wires could make things very ugly. Jets were
a game-changer for several reasons: They were faster and heavier and, thus, needed more
space to stop. They also didn’t have the endurance to wait for other planes to launch.
So, how could they find the runway space needed to operate these new tools of war? Building
larger carriers wasn’t a complete solution, this wouldn’t eliminate the issue of stopping
jets should they fail to catch the wires. The British decided to create an angled deck,
thereby allowing a jet that missed the arresting wires a chance to go around. This is where
the story about the angle deck begins. The angled flight deck was first tested on
HMS Triumph, by painting angled deck markings onto the centerline flight deck for touch
and go landings. This was also tested on USS Midway the same year. In both tests, the arresting
gear and barriers remained oriented to the original axis deck. During September through
December 1952 USS Antietam had a rudimentary sponson installed for true angled deck tests,
allowing for full arrested landings, which proved during trials to be superior. In 1953
Antietam trained with both US and British naval units, proving the worth of the angled
deck concept. HMS Centaur was modified with an overhanging angled flight deck in 1954.
The US Navy installed the decks as part of the SCB-125 upgrade for the Essex-class and
SCB-110/110A for the Midway-class. In February 1955, HMS Ark Royal became the first carrier
to be constructed and launched with the deck, followed in the same year by the lead ships
of the British Majestic-class and the American Forrestal-class or (USS Forrestal).
As a Conclusion, not only did the angled deck allow for the use of jets, it also made carriers
deadlier in general. Now, they could launch and land aircraft at the same time. This meant
that a carrier could send a major strike out and, at the same time, land its combat air
patrol. All in all, the angled deck had a very unintended (but welcome) consequence
on carrier performance. Although simple in concept, the conversion
of existing carriers to have angled decks involved structural alterations, loss of the
armament and aerials mounted on the port beam. The arrester wire machinery had to be re-aligned
to lie athwart the angled deck. Once the new structure was installed, it provided useful
volume for mess decks and machinery. It's a simple bit of geometry, but with big implications,
ones that carry forward to the modern day. Thank for watching, don’t forget to leave
your comment below if you have a great topic to be discussed in the next video.