Civilian Aircraft Carriers in the late 1920s?

Unfortunately, the timing and the naval limitations treaties makes the following unlikely, but it's a cool what-if:

According to the book "The Treaty Navy" after shipbuilders finished converting the Lexington to a carrier, a consortium of US shipbuilders proposed building six more ships using the same hull and engines as "Four day liners"--ships that could sail passengers across the Atlantic in four days. As proposed, the liners would retain Lexington's flight deck, thus allowing passengers to be flown onto or off of the liners. The liners would be partially subsidized by the postal service because of their ability to move mail across the ocean quickly. Essentially, these guys were proposing six lightly civilianized aircraft carriers.

Given the Great Depression and the Washington Naval treaty, it's extremely unlikely that these things would actually get built, but there's nothing wrong with exploring an occasional "beta" universe. No need to tell me this is unlikely. I'm well aware of that. What I'm asking is: What would have happened if they (at least some of them) were built? Maybe the proposal got floated before the Lexington conversion was finished and the plan got enough political momentum to overcome the caution about skirting the naval limitation treaties.

The Brits would likely respond with their own "four day liners", or at least start to--the Great Depression would make that difficult. If the Brits and US were playing that game, other countries might try too--the French and maybe the Germans. If the US and Brits are claiming these things are passenger liners, it would be hard for them to turn around and say the Germans can't have them. On the other hand, I'm not sure the Germans were financially capable of building a "fast liner" in the later 1920s.

In any case, where does this scenario take us?
 
It's an intriguing possibility. But I thought that the remainder of the Lexington's had been scrapped at the yards after it was confirmed that there would be no battlecruisers. As Lexington wasn't finished until the late 1920's, I don't think there'd have been any hulls/engines left to convert.
 
Not civilian lexingtons, but some of dads ,,boys own,, stories involved mid atlantic floating airfields. That would allow transatlantic flights with refueling, much faster than going part way by boat.
 
To fly the north atlantic with planes of the ford trimotor class (550 miles range) youd need two such airfields, perhaps three. St johns to shannon is 1600 miles, so either you build an airport further west, extend the range of the plane a bit orbuild three airports.
 
I wonder if some would take the advantage of being artificial islands in international waters to have some less savoury busineses running on them.
 
To fly the north atlantic with planes of the ford trimotor class (550 miles range) youd need two such airfields, perhaps three. St johns to shannon is 1600 miles, so either you build an airport further west, extend the range of the plane a bit orbuild three airports.

Generally the idea of this kind of proposal wasn't to fly the whole route, but to add aircraft capability to a ship that sails the whole route. In this case you would cut a day off the crossing time by flying out to the ship as it hits the aircraft's maximum range outbound but then stay with the ship until it gets within range of shore.

I know that there were some more or less operational catapult launched mailplanes on liners for a while doing this in one direction, but in general I'd think it would be an interesting experiment but very expensive and ultimately not all that workable. You might find enough of a market to make it more or less worthwhile if you could somehow place a long term limit on aircraft range, but realistically the kind of money involved in developing this sort of thing would be sufficient to get early transatlantic flying boats, which are going to be a lot more attractive to investors.

The one place I could begin to imagine this getting any kind of attention would be for French mail planes between Africa and Brazil. Even there though I'd think the most likely form would be naval seaplane carriers being contracted to support an airline rather than a true private ship, let alone a carrier.
 

Cook

Banned
I wonder if some would take the advantage of being artificial islands in international waters to have some less savoury busineses running on them.
You mean like alcohol, hookers and casinos during prohibition? Hardly necessary; they have Atlantic City for that.
 
Why do they have to have flight decks? Why not just make them into regular passenger liners? You could use them in Transatlantic, South American, and Hawaii/Phillippine service. With Government subsidies for mail on the Transatlantic South American and mail/government personnel moved on the Pacific routes you might find a way to use them. They could be made to be converted to a regular Lexington class carrier if they needed to be.
 
Is an "aircraft carrier bridge" possible?

By that, I mean a chain of aircraft carriers, hundreds of miles apart, stretched across the Atlantic. Planes would fly from one to the other, land, refuel, and take off again. Is there any reason to put such a system in place in the early days of aviation, or would it be made useless by transatlantic flight capability?

Cheers,
Ganesha
 
Is an "aircraft carrier bridge" possible?

By that, I mean a chain of aircraft carriers, hundreds of miles apart, stretched across the Atlantic. Planes would fly from one to the other, land, refuel, and take off again. Is there any reason to put such a system in place in the early days of aviation, or would it be made useless by transatlantic flight capability?

Cheers,
Ganesha

Other than as a probably one off military stunt no, its not really feasible.
 
I could see the utility of these liners given the constraints on airplanes of the period. You're one of the rich of the roaring twenties. You need to get to Europe in a hurry. You fly to the liner, spend two days in a luxury cabin on board, then take off and fly the rest of the way to Europe. I could see people doing that--probably not enough to keep six ships going, but some.

As noted, the ships would have to be built from scratch because there weren't battlecruiser hulls left over after Lexington and Saratoga to build them on. I'm guessing that the best you could expect is maybe one completed and maybe one partly done before the Great Depression hits, and that's if they start well before Lexington is done. The company would probably go belly-up in the depression. Maybe a German company buys the incomplete one as scrap, finishes it and has essentially a Lexington class carrier for Hitler to play with when he comes to power. I'm pretty sure the US would find some excuse not to allow the completed one to fall into German hands, and would probably insist on keeping the option of bringing it into service open in the 1930 naval agreements--so one more US carrier and maybe a German carrier by 1934-35.
 
Interesting way to get a German carrier operational, but I doubt the US would mess around with a ship like this (as a carrier anyway). The flightdeck would be perfectly functional (might even be remarkably large actually, if they want to try things like trimotors), but I'd have to assume that any carrier liner is going to have pretty limited hangar space and probably not much in the way of fuel storage. These ships are, after all, going to have to be able to be profitable as conventional liners at the end of the day.

That said, a troop transport that can carry a squadron or so of fighters won't be a bad thing early on either, so its not like it will have NO military value.
 
In the late 1920s, US Lines contemplated building a large, fast liner for the trans-Atlantic trade that could compete for the Blue Riband, & in 1928, the USN took that idea & drew up potential design for such a ship because of the possibilities of converting her into an extra fleet carrier upon mobilization. The proposed ship would have been 980' long, with a partially offset bridge & funnels, & even in merchant configuration, would have included substantial carrier features, including a flight deck, not only to permit a shipboard mail plane service, but also to increase the likelihood of getting government subsidies to help with construction & operating costs as a shadow carrier. However, the US Shipping Board rejected the idea as economically unsound.

For those of you with access to Friedman's volume on US carriers, a sketch of this ship can be found at the top of pg. 126.
 
Layman & McLaughlin's The Hybrid Warship has a chapter on Merchant Hybrids. At best the use of aircraft decreases the transit time by a few hours, but not enough to warrant the price.
 
The Lufthansa used four catapult ships to refuel and start their flying boats on the South Atlantic route. during the war they were used to start recon planes for the Uboats. Perhaps there can be found a reason for the Lufthansa to want land based aircraft on the route and they build or rebuild some carriers instead.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The Lufthansa used four catapult ships to refuel and start their flying boats on the South Atlantic route. during the war they were used to start recon planes for the Uboats. Perhaps there can be found a reason for the Lufthansa to want land based aircraft on the route and they build or rebuild some carriers instead.

To me it is easier to see the Germans trying some stunt to get around the ToV. Something much smaller with a flight deck. After all, the German mail planes you mention are not too far from being an effectivish U-boat tender scout if one assumes the codes were not broken. I could see the Germans trying some "science" or "mail" vessels that look a lot like a CVE. With the laxity of the UK, they might not react too strongly to some "science" vessel working in the south Atlantic doing mapping flights of the area around Antarctica or some other plausable reason such as helping the German whaling industry find whales.

Or just some pork barrel project to get funding for any other state.
 
I could see the utility of these liners given the constraints on airplanes of the period. You're one of the rich of the roaring twenties. You need to get to Europe in a hurry. You fly to the liner, spend two days in a luxury cabin on board, then take off and fly the rest of the way to Europe. I could see people doing that--probably not enough to keep six ships going, but some.

Interesting concepts, and I believe I've seen some old "Popular Science" covers showing such ships - or just massive floating airfields to allow planes to fly transtlantic.

In an alternate 1920's-early 30's, I could see civilian aircraft carriers and rigid airships becoming natural competitors for the "fast" 2-3 day Atlantic crossing crowd The airship would give the traveler an easy 2-3 day port-to-port crossing in comfort, while the airplane/carrier combo would give the excitement of the plane trip/carrier landing on each end, with much higher luxury on board. An economic and operational advantage of the liner is that it could also carry hundreds of 2nd and 3rd class passengers and tons of freight/mail while the limits of flight and economics of airship operation required its 50-75 passengers to all be high-end travelers, and space for extra freight/mail was extremely limited.
 

Thande

Donor
There is a narrow window of opportunity for this: it would make a lot of sense in the 1920s and 30s due to the lack of airports (the same reason flying-boats were popular, and airships to some extent) but would be mostly obsoleted when WW2 led to loads of military airports being built and converted to civilian ones after the war.
 
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