Originally Posted by e of pi
Amphibulous, you are exagerating a bit. With the 71' span of the UB-14 compared to the 10' beam of the Higgins boats, even with a full wingspan allowed between aircraft you'd only be able to land 14 boats where you can land one plane (averaged over the coast under attack). That's bad enough, you don't need to exagerate it to "hundreds."
1. There is no way you land aircraft with only a wingspan between them - it sounds a lot, but over a landing run of hundreds of yards it is easily eaten up. Especially with poor visibility, the distraction of fire, aircraft being damaged and losing control, etc. If a single aircraft is hit it might slew over the paths of half a dozen others.
2. Landing craft formations are TWO DIMENSIONAL. You can stack then behind each other without serious collision risk. With aircraft, no - you need a gap of a mile or so.
3. With aircraft you have to have to have a whole wave land, turn a round, take off - the beach is blocked for this entire cycle.
4. Turnaround is agonizing: the tighter aircraft are packed, the more one has to delay for another
...One fixed wing aircraft really does use the same amount of beach space as hundreds of LCTs. If you try to do crazy formation flying stuff while landing, with wingtips only a wingspan apart, you're going to lose horrible numbers of aircraft. Really: stop imagining this is an airport and remember that you're inserting these things into the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan - this is ***combat.***