A CTOL carrier aircraft, in use by 5 or 6 countries...

MacCaulay

Banned
...that's your challenge, or whatever. Conventional fixed wing aircraft seem to be the hardest thing to keep going on the water now, especially with the amazing abilities of the Harrier.

The aircraft in question doesn't have to be used by all five countries at the same time, it just has to be used by 5 or 6 countries throughout it's service life.

My personal vote would be the A-4 Skyhawk.

In OTL we've got...Australia (off HMAS Melbourne), Brazil (off Sao Paulo), Argentina (Vienticinco de Mayo), US Navy (pick a carrier since the 60s)...and then there's another one needed. I'd say either Spain, or Malaysia (deciding to spend it's way into the hole to look nice, and because the idea of a Malaysian-Australian Carrier Battle seems fucking awesome).
 
My vote goes to the Bug. Rhinos are too unwieldy and large, and are hellish on approach to a flattop when heavily loaded.
 
I think the only rival the Skyhawk could have would be the Dassault Super Etendard, because its the only other plane that can operate off of small carriers that was produced in any kind of numbers.

As for carriers, keeping other countries in the carrier business isn't all that hard. Keep Canada in Australia in the carrier business (do that by replacing Melbourne in 1982 and Bonaventure in 1970), keep Britain having a real flat-top (maybe Eagle and/or Ark Royal stay in the game longer, and that Thatcher orders them replaced with one or two real angled-deck carrier) and convince Spain and Italy to build full-blown carriers instead of ski-ramp ones.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I think the only rival the Skyhawk could have would be the Dassault Super Etendard, because its the only other plane that can operate off of small carriers that was produced in any kind of numbers.

I don't know...I know the Etendards the Argentines had weren't operated off their carrier except in a few circumstances where that was the only place to land.

My only other thought was the F-8 Crusader...the French seemed to like it, and it does seem to provide a bit more punch as an air-superiority fighter than the A-4. I wonder who else could've taken the F-8?
 
I don't know...I know the Etendards the Argentines had weren't operated off their carrier except in a few circumstances where that was the only place to land.

My only other thought was the F-8 Crusader...the French seemed to like it, and it does seem to provide a bit more punch as an air-superiority fighter than the A-4. I wonder who else could've taken the F-8?

Perhaps somebody gets the idea NASA had and develops the F-8 with supercritical wings and the Allison turbofan from the A-7, thus giving better payload and better range and better takeoff and landing characteristics. The USN decides to go with this variant for a carrier-borne strike aircraft, and it catches the eyes of several countries who also operate such carriers.

If the Brits stay in the carrier business, they could buy Hornets for sir superiority duties (Tomcats are too big for any of their carriers) and use these to complement the Blackburn Buccaneers of the FAA. That gets the attention of several countries. Canada and Australia use them for their carriers in the 1970s (assuming that Bonaventure is replaced with a new straight-deck, maybe they build a license-built Clemenceau class, maybe?). I'm not sure whether they'd work on light carrier like what India, Brazil and Argentina were running at the time, and they definitely wouldn't work for what Spain was running at the time, which was a USN WWII light carrier.
 
The purpose of aircraft carriers is to project power. If Canada wanted to forcefully annex Turks and Caicos, a carrier would be a viable tool. However, the weapons employed by carriers are their aircraft, and they have to be superior to the enemy's. Heineman's Scooter was a miraculous aircraft in it's time. In USN service, it was replaced by the A-7, which was replaced by the F/A-18, which is due for replacement. If you're suggesting that countries that can't afford nuclear-powered super-carriers should operate naval air, perhaps a cruise ship with a flight deck and a couple of Spads would fill the bill. Paying passengers would help justify the expense.

I vote for the A-1 Skyraider. Still a Heineman bird.
 
The Bug wasn't introduced until '83 IOTL. Would a Bucc fit on a Clemenceau-class CV? I agree that a Bug/Bucc CVW would be excellent. :D
 
For CTOL planes you need CTOL ships, and once we get to the 60s the Majestics just don't cut it. However there is another class out there with a lot more potential, the 4 ships of the Albion class.

Ideally the British would trade in the Albion, Bulwark and Centaur for the Bonaventure, Melbourne and one of the South American carriers in the early 60s in the interests of keeping these ships alive as fixed wing carriers. They could then convert the Majestics into Commando carriers, which would be cheaper to run with their less machinery and lower performance. Perhaps Hermes could then go to Canada or Australia in 1976 when CVA 02 entered service, Canada/Australia passing its earlier Albion to the other South American country. So then we have Australia, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, France, Britain in the CTOL carrier game. As for the plane, while I'm in fantasy land, the F/A 8 Crusader, exploiting the wing pylons for bomb carriage.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
The purpose of aircraft carriers is to project power. If Canada wanted to forcefully annex Turks and Caicos, a carrier would be a viable tool. However, the weapons employed by carriers are their aircraft, and they have to be superior to the enemy's.

That brings up an interesting point that I read once. It turns out that one reason (among many) that the Soviets seemed to not get into the whole Big Carrier concept like the US and the French did was that their idea of what a carrier should be used for was significantly different than the West's.

The Soviet Navy believed that the main weapon of a naval task force were the missiles carried on the ships and so the job of an aircraft-carrying ship employed in a group of ships would be to provide (in essence) a Combat Air Patrol over the group when it was out of the effective range for land-based air support.
 
The easiest way to do it would surely be to continue the Cold War, I read somewhere that the Soviets were planning to reverse engineer the Harrier.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
The easiest way to do it would surely be to continue the Cold War, I read somewhere that the Soviets were planning to reverse engineer the Harrier.


The Yak-38 Forger? It was...sporty. By which I mean dangerous. They deployed it on some of their VTOL carriers, but it was never as capable as the Harrier. It had a hard time with high temperatures and they could never get it to carry all the weight it was designed for.
 
Mac: the Forger had serious problems with sudden, uncontrollable throttle surges in hover mode. It caused so many pilot fatalities that YAK eventually installed a system which automatically triggered ejection whenever the nozzle angle or AoA went outside operational limits for even a few seconds. That's why they scrapped it as soon as they could get the Kuz with STOBAR Flankers.
 


The Yak-38 Forger? It was...sporty. By which I mean dangerous. They deployed it on some of their VTOL carriers, but it was never as capable as the Harrier. It had a hard time with high temperatures and they could never get it to carry all the weight it was designed for.

Typical Soviet Manufacture then? :p
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Typical Soviet Manufacture then? :p
:D


According to Modern Soviet Weapons edited by Ray Bonds, during some ops in the southern hemisphere they had to lighten the load until there weren't any weapons left on the hardpoints, and it still wouldn't take off. Then they siphoned some of the gas out, and it finally was light enough to fly.

Maybe they would've operated (close) to spec in the North Pacific or North Atlantic, but if the Soviets had ever had to use one of those things anywhere else...good lord that'd have a problem.

The odd thing here is that if they could've actually made a Sea Harrier-knockoff, then that would've been about the thing they needed: just something to provide a CAP over a SAG while it's out of land-based air cover.
 
IIRC it could do rolling vertical landings, why not rolling vertical takeoffs? Ship forward speed would be something like 25kt and a roll could add another 50kt before shoving the nozzles downwards to lift off at perhaps 3/5 of wing lift.
 
Rhinos are too unwieldy and large, and are hellish on approach to a flattop when heavily loaded.

Apart from the A-4, at first the Rhino would have been my second choice.


A CTOL carrier aircraft, in use by 5 or 6 countries...
After rereading MacCaulay's original question, I first thought the winner was:
the E-2 Hawkeye.
It's a conventional carrier-capable aircraft, operated by 8 or more different countries. Although only France and the US used them on carriers. :D
The same point also applies for the A-4 and F-4; plenty of countries used them which didn't have conventional carriers.

The CTOL aircraft post-war used by at least 5/6 nations on a carrier, which is what MacCaulay probably means, is AFAIK the S-2 Tracker;
used on carriers by the Americans, Argentines, Australians, Brazilians, Canadians and Dutch.
Presto 6! :eek:

Picture of a Tracker which has seen better times:
Grumman_S-2N.jpg
 
Argentina, which hasn't had a carrier for 10 year now, has carrier qualified Turbo Trackers operating from Brazil's Sao Paulo and doing touch and gos on USN carriers. A lot of effort for a country which hasn't have a carrier for a decade.
 
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