The Royal Navy with CVA01

[Rule of cool]

DNC is adamant the combination of gallery deck and deck edge lifts require a waterline beam of 120ft or more.
Below that you get to compromise and choose what you value most.

Deck edge = no gallery deck = large island, but can have a taller hanger.
Gallery deck = no deck edge lifts but you get a smaller island.

On all likelihood the Medium Fleet Carrier would possess the bow 151ft stroke catapult and waist 199ft stroke catapult.
Deck strengthened for 60,000lb aircraft.

So the USN carriers have small islands because they have a gallery deck between the fight deck and hangar? Further, they can have the gallery deck and deck edge lifts because of their 120'+ beam?

 

[zen]

So the USN carriers have small islands because they have a gallery deck between the fight deck and hangar? Further, they can have the gallery deck and deck edge lifts because of their 120'+ beam?

Yes, stability requirement.
RN view was a preference for 24ft Freeboard above the waterline for the hanger deck.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Yes, stability requirement.
RN view was a preference for 24ft Freeboard above the waterline for the hanger deck.

Pretty sure the US supercarrier hangar deck is 30ft above waterline...

Of course, it probably helps to be a good 30,000tons greater displacement.

 

[zen]

23.5 was viewed as a minimum if memory serves. Although maybe it was 22ft....I forget.

Eagle and Ark had 30ft for the upper hanger. No gallery deck and large islands.

Victorious has 14ft. This is why there's no Deck Edge Lift. Small island.

Hermes has no gallery deck, a deck edge lift but a bigger island. All on 90ft of beam in the water.

 

[Rule of cool]

Wow, you learn something every day.

Also, British ship designers did know what they were doing, they just had to work within various practical constraints.

 

[Yellow Palace]

The plans for 3, 4 and even 5 CVA01s are to fit in with this requirement, and the F4K development was ordered in July 1964 for the RN with 140 aircraft being the requirement.

One of the things that strikes me about this requirement is that, on paper at least, it ought to have been accompanied for a requirement for a similar number of Buccaneers.

That admittedly isn't all that different from the number of Buccaneers actually built, including the RAF order. But it is interesting to think about the number of fast jets that were seen in the early-mid 1960s as being required over the next decade or so:

• 140 Buccaneers for carrierborne strike
• 155 P.1154 to replace Hunters as tactical fighters
• 158 TSR.2 to replace Canberras and Valiants
• 175 F-4D to replace Lightnings
• 140 F-4K to replace Sea Vixens

That's about a third of the British fast jet fleet being operated by the Fleet Air Arm, as well as the Medium Bomber Force being replaced by Polaris submarines in the same timeframe. No wonder the RAF viewed the Royal Navy as an existential threat - once it becomes a choice between TSR.2 or carriers for East of Suez, it starts looking a lot like the Navy might have more combat aircraft than the Air Force!

 

[zen]

Wow, you learn something every day.

Also, British ship designers did know what they were doing, they just had to work within various practical constraints.

I did go into this previously.

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/rn-post-war-carrier-conundrums.10464/

 

[Scott Kenny]

One of the things that strikes me about this requirement is that, on paper at least, it ought to have been accompanied for a requirement for a similar number of Buccaneers.

That admittedly isn't all that different from the number of Buccaneers actually built, including the RAF order. But it is interesting to think about the number of fast jets that were seen in the early-mid 1960s as being required over the next decade or so:

• 140 Buccaneers for carrierborne strike
• 155 P.1154 to replace Hunters as tactical fighters
• 158 TSR.2 to replace Canberras and Valiants
• 175 F-4D to replace Lightnings
• 140 F-4K to replace Sea Vixens

That's about a third of the British fast jet fleet being operated by the Fleet Air Arm, as well as the Medium Bomber Force being replaced by Polaris submarines in the same timeframe. No wonder the RAF viewed the Royal Navy as an existential threat - once it becomes a choice between TSR.2 or carriers for East of Suez, it starts looking a lot like the Navy might have more combat aircraft than the Air Force!

There's a reason the world's second largest air force is the US Navy...

Honestly would have been awesome to see 140 Bucs and 140 F-4Ks.

 

[Yellow Palace]

Honestly would have been awesome to see 140 Bucs and 140 F-4Ks.

The numbers actually work out pretty well for four air wings when you look at the number of Gannet AEW, Gannet COD, and Sea King HAS.1 ordered, as well as the planned 140 Phantoms. I've never seen a planned total for Buccaneers, but it must have been approximately equal to the number of Phantoms, given that the RN seems to have planned on having equal numbers of strike and attack aircraft in an air wing.

 

[zen]

The TAU had 32 Fighters, 64 Strike/Attack making 96 fast jets and 8 AEW.

Fighter requirement was 4 aloft on CAP for 4 hours.

 

[Rule of cool]

One of the things that strikes me about this requirement is that, on paper at least, it ought to have been accompanied for a requirement for a similar number of Buccaneers.

That admittedly isn't all that different from the number of Buccaneers actually built, including the RAF order. But it is interesting to think about the number of fast jets that were seen in the early-mid 1960s as being required over the next decade or so:

• 140 Buccaneers for carrierborne strike
• 155 P.1154 to replace Hunters as tactical fighters
• 158 TSR.2 to replace Canberras and Valiants
• 175 F-4D to replace Lightnings
• 140 F-4K to replace Sea Vixens

That's about a third of the British fast jet fleet being operated by the Fleet Air Arm, as well as the Medium Bomber Force being replaced by Polaris submarines in the same timeframe. No wonder the RAF viewed the Royal Navy as an existential threat - once it becomes a choice between TSR.2 or carriers for East of Suez, it starts looking a lot like the Navy might have more combat aircraft than the Air Force!

The problem isn't one of RAF vs RN, rather it's RAF block obsolescence due to bad decision making in 1957-59.

All the misguided investment in 'interim' aircraft in Sandys tenure created a problem where the RAF needed to re-capitalise it's entire combat fleet in 1965-75. The alternative is to invest big in the Lightning early as both a fighter and fighter-bomber (~16 sqns 450-500 a/c), so by the late 60s the RAF needs 158 TSR2 and ~60 P.1127 and the big Lightning fleet can serve until 1978-85.

Then the RN won't be the threat the RAF made it out to be.

 

[Rule of cool]

I did go into this previously.

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/rn-post-war-carrier-conundrums.10464/

I've not gone down the rabbit hole previously, I assumed that British ship designers know what they're doing more or less because whenever I do slide down technical rabbit holes there's a reason for why X or Y was done. This is another example of that, an interesting technical fact.

 

[zen]

The problem isn't one of RAF vs RN, rather it's RAF block obsolescence due to bad decision making in 1957-59.

All the misguided investment in 'interim' aircraft in Sandys tenure created a problem where the RAF needed to re-capitalise it's entire combat fleet in 1965-75. The alternative is to invest big in the Lightning early as both a fighter and fighter-bomber (~16 sqns 450-500 a/c), so by the late 60s the RAF needs 158 TSR2 and ~60 P.1127 and the big Lightning fleet can serve until 1978-85.

Then the RN won't be the threat the RAF made it out to be.

You could say this is actually the failure of both the effort at a joint aircraft (DH110) and of Vickers-Supermarine to produce something like the Type 576 supersonic Scimitar earlier.

Because although of lower absolute performance compared to the Lightning, such an aircraft has the capacity to tote higher performance missiles as in Red Dean, Red Hebe and various other options of radar Firestreak etc.

As much as we can see that superpriority messed up the evolutionary processes that were in train.

Frankly the abandonment of the Type 556 FAW variant of the Scimitar also haunts this.

 

[BlackBat242]

23.5 was viewed as a minimum if memory serves. Although maybe it was 22ft....I forget.

Eagle and Ark had 30ft for the upper hanger. No gallery deck and large islands.

Victorious has 14ft. This is why there's no Deck Edge Lift. Small island.

Hermes has no gallery deck, a deck edge lift but a bigger island. All on 90ft of beam in the water.

Indomitable had a 23' 6" freeboard at the level of the upper hangar floor.
Ark & Eagle had 10' for the lower hangar.
Hermes had a 24' freeboard.
The 1952 carrier proposal had a 24' freeboard.

The Clemenceaus had a 24' freeboard.

The Essex and Midway classes had a 25' freeboard.

When it comes to Hermes, I would say that in addition to being too small, it had a sub-optimal configuration (should have had the rear lift as a deck-edge unit instead of the front lift and a similar catapult configuration as I suggested for Victorious; it also lacked a gallery deck) and was too slow and had an insufficient steam generation capability (they should have switched to the same Foster-Wheeler boilers as fitted to Victorious after her reconstruction - this should have provided roughly 90 000 shp and a clearly higher steam pressure).

Yes, it should have been the aft lift that was moved to deck-edge (and the fore could have been moved 9' to starboard to align with the starboard side of the hangar to give room for a much longer port bow catapult).

Hermes had issues with her port deck-edge lift... here is a comment from a former crewmember of Hermes (hermes82 on Navweaps):

Hermes fwd lift was a deck edge side lift.
It was pretty dangerous in choppy weather nearly got washed over the side on at least 2 occasions, really thought I was a goner.
My mate was the lift driver at flight deck level he got submerged by one wave whilst we stuck a cab on it, you can imagine how wet we were.
The lift acted like a knife blade through the water when it was at hangar level damaged the cab as well.

This PDF is a report on repairs made to Hermes' deck-edge lift at sea (on passage from Singapore to Trincomalee in 1961 (the lift had gotten askew due to component failures and was in danger of jamming or falling off):

 

[NOMISYRRUC]

Re the discussion upthread about how many Buccaneers the RN wanted. This is part of Post 15 in the thread “CVA-01 - What was the RN carrier plan 1966-1976” which was written by yours truly.

***** ***** ***** ***** *****​

This quote is from the Air History Branch monograph "Defence Policy and the Royal Air Force 1964-1970" by A.S. Bennell (National Archives reference Air 41/91) and straddles Page 7-5 & 7-6 of Chapter 7 "London, Washington, Canberra (January 1966)".

In opening discussion on the aircraft programme two days later Healey pointed out that his proposals significantly reduced the number of combat aircraft and the scale of aircraft purchases from those envisaged at the time of the 1965 Defence White Paper. The planned purchase of the F111A had been reduced from 110 to 50, that of the C130 from 82 to 70, and that of the Buccaneer from 171 to 96. The requirement of Phantoms for the RN had been reduced, though that for the RAF had been increased. There would be two substantial Anglo-French projects, that for the Jaguar strike/trainer and that of the proposed variable geometry strike aircraft planned to enter service in 1974/75. All this would lead to a substantial loading on the British aircraft industry, although a reduction of £1,250m over ten years when compared with the aircraft programme of the previous administration. The dollar element of the programme had been reduced since the time of the previous White Paper by a further £175m equivalent. Healey dismissed the Spey/Mirage concept, not only on performance grounds, but also because neither France nor the Federal Republic of Germany intended to adopt the aircraft. In a detailed presentation of the comparative merits of the F111A and the developed Buccaneer, he contended that the capacity of the F111A at long range and at both high and low altitudes and its avionics fit enabled it to find and record target information in all weathers. The developed Buccaneer with the Elliot nav/attack system would certainly be between 3½ and 4 years later than the F111A; it was "the best of a dying generation of fixed-wing subsonic aircraft". Development effort would be better devoted, jointly, to the AFVG aircraft. With all of this CAS spoke in agreement.8

8 OPD (66) 5th M 21 Jan 66 Cab 148.

The 1965 Defence White Paper was published in February 1965 and Dennis Healey said the above on 21st January 1966. Therefore does ...

and that of the Buccaneer from 171 to 96.

... mean 171 Buccaneer S.2s were planned for the RN in February 1965? I think it does because it was well before the decision to phase out the strike carriers by 1975 and transfer the surviving Buccaneers to the RAF.

 

[zen]

171....
The TAU is 64 such and we know 50% goes to storage.
Leaving 21 aircraft for OCU and OEU of which only 12 might be needed.

 

[Kiltonge]

Yes, just the one launcher for Ikara.

One the subject of the "Alaskan Highway", I know what it is (actually properly called the Alaska Highway these days), but why was the moniker attached to this idea? Being of Canadian-American origin it seems a rather odd choice (you'd expect the Admiralty wags to come up with something like "By-Pass"!).

The Alaska Highway was built to join airfields together, so I assumed it was a play on that: joining the catapult 'airfield' to the landing 'airfield'.

 

[BlackBat242]

The Alaska Highway was built to join airfields together, so I assumed it was a play on that: joining the catapult 'airfield' to the landing 'airfield'.

The Alaska Highway was to join the Alaskan Territory to the "lower 48" - the rest of the US!

It was to enable movement of men & material from the US to Alaska to provide both defense and commercial opportunities for the part of US holdings closest to Japan.

Airfields were also built along the highway to ease transfer of aircraft to both Alaska and via Lend-Lease to the USSR - but they were not the primary reason for building the highway.

 

[Rule of cool]

Wasn't the Alaska(n?) Highway the nickname given to the narrow path outside the island on British carriers that ground support equipment could could move fore and aft without disrupting flying ops? IIRC what CVA01 had was the expanded version of this - the Alaska Taxiway where aircraft could move fore and aft without disrupting flying ops.

 

[Arjen]

Wasn't the Alaska(n?) Highway the nickname given to the narrow path outside the island on British carriers that ground support equipment could could move fore and aft without disrupting flying ops?

Yes.

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/the-royal-navy-with-cva01.39360/page-5#post-654587

 

[Kiltonge]

Airfields were also built along the highway to ease transfer of aircraft to both Alaska and via Lend-Lease to the USSR - but they were not the primary reason for building the highway.

Actually the airfields of the Northwest Staging Route came first, which was the problem: logistics were horrific.

There were three highway routes proposed in 1942, of which the third, linking the airfields, was adopted.