US Aircraft Carriers

USS Shangri-La Aboard the Aircraft Carrier USS Shangri-La, circa 1962, somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. From the film - Flying Clipper, (1962). With narration by Burl Ives.
The USA has been flying supersonic aircraft from carriers consistently for over 60 years. No one else's record comes anywhere close.

The Grumman F-11 Tiger was the first supersonic jet fighter to operate from an aircraft carrier. They started in 1956. Of the aircraft in the video, the Skyhawk is notable (in my mind) because Argentina had a bunch of them. The other jet fighter in the video is the F-8 Crusader. I seem to recall having a model of one when I was a kid. It wasn't a particularly good-looking aircraft, but it was certainly capable. John Glenn made the first super-sonic cross country flight in a Crusader in 1957. Along the way he refueled from propeller driven AJ Savage tankers. He would have had to slow down to hook up with the tankers since they weren't able to go that fast. I suspect no one has tried to perform in-flight refueling at super-sonic speeds.

The photo reconnaissance version of the Crusader was sent to take some pictures of the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis. The F-101 Voodoo was also sent. The Voodoo was a land based airplane and was not designed to work with aircraft carriers.

The Crusader had 'variable-incidence' wings, which means the wing was mounted on a pivot so that the angle of attack could be changed to make it possible for the pilot to see where he was going and allow the aircraft to fly slow enough to land on a carrier.

Watching the video, I noticed that right at the beginning of the catapult launch, a flap across the big air inlet under the nose opens up. Didn't find any explanation for it.


US Aircraft Carriers
At the start of WW2, we had eight aircraft carriers. During the course of the war, we built another 26. After the war, construction slowed down for a few years, but then in 1955 it picked up again and we've been building them pretty consistently ever since. We currently have eleven aircraft carriers. At a million dollars a day each, it's costing the average American family of four about a dollar a week to keep them all running.

I haven't figured out how to get the date to display across the bottom of the above chart, so I made up a little table to show the corresponding dates.


Correspondence of Days & Dates


Via daily timewaster

More aircraft carrier posts here.