Merchant Aircraft Carriers (MAC) ‘Slattery will get you nowhere’ A 1941 British war movie in part filmed on Ark Royalġ0. Not a bad carrier, we just couldn’t resist including this epic photograph of a Vigilante taking off from Enterprise with a Crusader. Leaving them with something that could have been Top Gun but ends up being Ships with Wings. It’s scientifically impossible to make a bad aircraft carrier, however occasionally people make the wrong design compromises. For the benefit of comparison, a Nimitz class carrier is around 100,000 tons (the weight of 880,761 bearded pigs) while an Invincible class was around 20,000 tons (194,174 bearded pigs), while a cross Channel ferry is around 40,000 tons once you’ve filled it with tourists, duty free and second-rate fry-ups. This is probably the sort of thing British industry should have taken as a warning at the time.įor those not of a nautical bent, ships size is generally talked about in terms of their displacement, not length or beam. Britain laying down HMS Hermes on 15 January 1918 but the Japanese completing the Hōshō on 27 December 1922, 14 months before Hermes, despite starting almost three years later. In an interesting move both Britain and Japan can claim to have constructed the first carrier ordered and built as such from the keel up. Britain gets bragging rights as their creator, converting an half-built Italian liner, the Conte Rosso into HMS Argus, the first recognisable aircraft carrier with a full-length flight deck which commissioned on 16 September 1918. Over to Bing, former Royal Navy Lynx helicopter Observer and contributor to the fabulous Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes.Īircraft carriers, big boats full of seamen and pilots, are basically massive floating aphrodisiacs – or money-burning toys for militarism – or vital tools for global security – all depending on your point of view.

If I’ve used the wrong images it’s because all ships look the same to me. Here is an article that is more about bloody ships than planes.

Seaborne airbases that didn’t quite float Wildcats on the deck of the lamentable CVA-4.īing Chandler has tricked us.

World of warships graf zeppelin sea