Largest Practical Carrier/Air Force Base Aircraft Contingents?

Delta Force

Banned
The Midway class was designed for 130 aircraft, and Shinano could have carried 160. It's unlikely the Midway class would have been designed to carry such a large number of aircraft if the logistics wouldn't work out on that scale. How difficult would controlling over a hundred aircraft be for an aircraft carrier? What about for basing at a single air force base? Do things change with the shift from piston engines to turboprops, jets, and other high performance aircraft?
 
The Midway class was designed for 130 aircraft, and Shinano could have carried 160. It's unlikely the Midway class would have been designed to carry such a largenumber of aircraft if the logistics wouldn't work out on that scale. How difficult would controlling over a hundred aircraft be for an aircraft carrier? What about for basing at a single air force base? Do things change with the shift from piston engines to turboprops, jets, and other high performance aircraft?

There has been a discussion as part of the Zweites Buch rewrite on this issue. Seems an important key to make larger air groups work is the angledflight deck allowing simultaneous take-off and landings. I would suppose that extra deck space and elevators or any factor that could accelerate the time to launch each air craft and its recovery would have a positive effect as would increased loiter time. Eg. an aircraft carriers could accommodate many Zero's effectively, but not that many Me109T's.

PS. As I get it the Shinano would not have operated that many planes, but carried a large contingent of replacement aircraft.
 
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It isn't just an angled flight deck - you've also got major command & control issues until the widespread use of radar and radios comes in towards the end of WW2. ~100 aircraft seems to be the practical upper limit, past that you don't benefit much from them and are better off building extra carriers.
So far as air bases go, the main issue is wake turbulence which sets the gap between takeoffs/landings (that's what limits the capacity of places like Heathrow). In practice they tend to be rather less busy nowadays as most countries have a surplus of military bases and spreading your aircraft about avoids putting them all on one basket which could then be shut down by a single air rad.
 
I agree that 100 planes seems to be the upper limit, even with big supercarriers that could possibly pack more aircraft in it hasn't been done.

As for an airbase, they can be as big as you like and laid out in any way possible with multiple runways on multiple axes that don't overlap.
 
100 aircraft on a carrier seems to be the upper limit: the Midways were designed for 130 but rarely went to sea in the late '40s-early '50s with more than a hundred. They never made a Korean deployment, mind, but spent the Korean War on rotational deployments to Europe with the Sixth Fleet.

Bases can have as many aircraft as they build ramp space and runways. Some SAC bases in the B-47 era had two wings (each with 36 B-47s and 12 KC-97s) assigned.
 
the air base thing is a bit of a red herring - especially if you lookat the V-force dispersal arrangements and later the potential to disperse the Mixed firghter force ... and of cours ethe ultimate in dispersal plans the RAFG harrier force ...
 
Austere dispersal strips are great when you're under the pump on the defensive, but when the air threat is manageable they have more disadvantages than advantages. A major airbase will often have connections to petroleum pipelines, a rail siding and major road connections which will work wonders for keeping a high intensity, high sortie rate air campaign going. The base itself will have facilities to undertake rapid turnaround and major repairs as well as properly facilitating things like flight and maintenance crew rest periods.
 

Delta Force

Banned
How safe were minimal interval takeoff procedures for following aircraft in the event that one of the aircraft suffered a failure and had to abort takeoff or even crashed? Also, how quickly can an aircraft carrier handle aircraft?

Going the other direction, have any other militaries adopted the ground handling procedures that the Israeli Air Force adopted during its various wars? They were able to get several times more sortie rates out of their aircraft that was standard for NATO forces.
 
It usually takes about fifteen minutes to get an Alpha Strike (full deck strike) launched. In the glory days of Naval Aviation, that meant usually a dozen Tomcats, sixteen to eighteen A-7s or F/A-18s, ten A-6s, plus a pair of EA-6Bs and a pair of F-14s (one with a TARPS recon pod and one for escort). Throw in four KA-6D tankers and a couple of S-3s rigged as tankers if the sub threat allowed.
 
One thing to remember about aircraft commands is it is not just about how many a carrier can carry or how many an airstrip can house, but how effectively command-and-control can manage said aircraft. I think around 100 is the limit that can be managed before it simply gets too crowded within the airspace
 
How safe were minimal interval takeoff procedures for following aircraft in the event that one of the aircraft suffered a failure and had to abort takeoff or even crashed?
I think you're asking the wrong question. MITO was developed on the assumption that there was an incoming nuclear weapon that would land in your lap if you didn't leave immediately. In the circumstances safety is pretty much irrelevant - so long as a failed aircraft isn't on the runway centreline, it will be ignored.
 
In Norman Friedman's U.S. Aircraft Carriers: An Illustrated Design History he relates a study done on the handling of large carrier air-groups (144 aircraft is the number mentioned). The conclusion was that a carrier with such a large air group couldn't use it effectively. There is a limit to how fast aircraft can be launched and recovered and during air operations, the carrier has to keep pointed into the wind. Unless you are lucky and into the wind is also the direction you want to be moving in, every time you stop to land/launch, you are losing tactical positioning. You can't keep a working distance off-shore, you can't chase after a fleeing enemy, you can't maneuver to bring the air wing within range of an elusive enemy.

The bigger carriers came along at the same time the aircraft got bigger. The Tigercat twin-engines were built for the Midways if my memory is correct, since the bigger carrier had the room for them. Jets also are generally bigger. So, the bigger size of the carriers allowed for a "normal" airgroup of bigger aircraft to be utilizied.

Tim
 
Bear in mind that the number of aircraft doesn't matter, the number of sortie do and often the two things have only the vaguest correlation. The HMAS Sydney had a CAG of 38 aircraft during her Korean war cruise, but flew a light fleet record of 89 sorties in a day, which is a lot of 'product' from 38 planes. If more planes doesn't equal more sorties then there is no point shipping them. The ideal size CAG is the one that can generate the maximum sorties, regardless of how many aircraft are in it.
 
HMS Habakkuk

Don't know what a proposed air complement would have been, but it would have involved twin engine bombers...

Edit: oh. right. "Practical". Never mind. :)
 
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