Flying Aircraft Carriers (2019)

https://neverwasmag.com/2019/08/flying-aircraft-carriers/

by cainxinth • 2 years ago

165 101 2 years ago

simonw• 2 years ago

Not enough people know that a hundred years ago there were genuine airship aircraft carriers flying around, launching biplanes and then having them land back on the airship while it was still flying!

How do you land a biplane on a Zeppelin? You fly up underneath it, match your speed with that of the airship, then hook onto a landing frame lowered beneath the aircraft and let it lift you back onboard.

I gave a talk about Zeppelin history back in 2008, and recently rediscovered the slides and audio and turned them into a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU

It has images of the biplane landing mechanism at 3m57s.

parker-3461• 2 years ago

That is fascinating, I have found myself learning more about these as I dive through the background works on Ace Combat contents.

While by no means a proper simulator, it certainly makes a fun arcade and sci-fi shooter experience.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

There was a super arcadey flight… I don’t even want to call it a simulator… game, Crimson Skies, that IIRC featured a Zeppelin carrier as your home base. I think it was fun, although I must have been around 10 when I played.

jtriangle• 2 years ago

Airships were so cool... and unfortunately, so flammable.

bugbuddy• 2 years ago

Helium airships were not flammable.

nickff• 2 years ago

Neither of the 'airship' aircraft carriers described in the article failed due to fire.

boringg• 2 years ago

Airships are cool but are a large easy target.

dragonwriter4• 2 years ago

Helium airships are not particularly flammable.

They don't deal with rough weather well, though.

Retric• 2 years ago

Regular aircraft carriers where extremely flammable and filled with explosives.

Originally they had wooden decks, boatloads of fuel, and no meaningful armor. Nowadays their made with ~70,000 tons of steel, and fire is still a major concern.

omnibrain• 2 years ago

Around 2000 I played a game named Crimson Skies. Set in an alternate reality where the US broke up into pieces and freelancers with their airships and planes ruled the skies. This game could use a sequel.

non-chalad2• 2 years ago

It is based on a tabletop RPG. (1)

1. https://www.aerodex.org/

scarby22• 2 years ago

It got a couple sequels but they were Xbox only and from what I hear not as good. But I agree it could do with a reboot. And a setting so I can actually hook the plane onto the airship rather than just getting close enough.

tylerflick• 2 years ago

I loved this game growing up! Perfectly ripe for a modern remake.

newZWhoDis• 2 years ago

I came here to post this. Incredible game!

Toutouxc• 2 years ago

I'd pay an AAA price for a sequel to that. I used to play it so much that I still regularly hum the orchestral theme.

pm3003• 2 years ago

Yeah, I was surprised they forgot to cite it in the article.

entropie2• 2 years ago

Not enough people know that a hundred years ago there were genuine airship aircraft carriers flying around, launching biplanes and then having them land back on the airship while it was still flying!

Featured in Indiana Jones the Last crusade, game and movie: https://youtu.be/s0vNsH81YeA?t=119

maxerickson2• 2 years ago

Almost a jinx.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27AAlYlyvZs has the plane leaving the Zeppelin.

maxerickson2• 2 years ago

Indiana Jones launches a plane from a Zeppelin in The Last Crusade.

It never occurred to me to question whether that was historically accurate (it looks very straightforward in the movie).

ansible2• 2 years ago

It isn't too far off from launching biplanes from the Akron / Macon airships. The biplanes had a big hook on top to latch into the trapeze mechanism, which isn't shown in the movie.

The other nitpick is that the airship should really run up to its highest airspeed to allow the biplane to recover quickly when launched. So that requires coordination with the airship crew.

_fat_santa• 2 years ago

I wonder what's preventing us from having airships now offering cruise like experiences in the sky. The only company I found doing them is OceanSky[1] though it seems like they are still in the early stages. My guess is they can't carry enough people to make the unit economics work without charging $10k/ticket.

[1] https://oceanskycruises.com/

Panzer04• 2 years ago

A precipitous amount of older airships went down due to bad weather. I suspect the risks are too high for modern sensibilities - they just seem too vulnerable.

jcranmer• 2 years ago

Airships tend to have a problem with poor weather. Of the 5 airships the US Navy used, only one of them lived long enough to be decommissioned, and the other 4 all ended in total structural failure in bad weather. I don't have handy stats for other countries, but I believe it's well in excess of 50% of all airships ending their lives in crashes.

billyhoffman• 2 years ago

Mustard did an awesome analysis of this exactly this: Flying Cruise Ships, why we don’t have giant air ships

https://youtu.be/LyaYaFzSPac?si=hZ6HV0YuCOg-WUYT

Basically, the economics no longer work. Airships really can’t carry that much weight relative to their operational costs. They’re loud and they’re slow which isn’t a great customer experience. The amount of money you would have to pay for a ticket to make it economical would be more than a first class ticket on a modern jet, which would also get you there much faster.

(BTW all of Mustard’s videos are great. They have super high production value and are primarily about transportation technologies of the 50s 60s 70s and 80s. I recommend watching it on Nebula if you can.)

MikeTheGreat• 2 years ago

I'm curious - how fast can a Zeppelin go? How slow can a bi-plane fly?

"Match speed" seems like a thing that's really easy to write and much harder to actually do :)

scarby22• 2 years ago

Two random samples I just happened to pick: the graf Zeppelin had a top speed of 80 mph and a Sopwith camel (biplane) had a stall speed of 48 mph.

As far as I have read this was not an easy process generally, however aborting and trying again would be fairly easy as you're nowhere near the ground and have plenty of time to recover.

yourusername• 2 years ago

Stall speed for a biplane can be quite low. A AN-2 about 35 knots which means with a stiff headwind you can appear to be flying backwards

zer00eyz• 2 years ago

The US is all over this concept today, Only with bombers/transports and drones/UAV's

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/here-...

https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/09/13/us-drone-swarms-ta...

I suspect that in light of the war in Ukraine were going to see a lot of development on this front.

chipdart• 2 years ago

I think this comment should feature higher in the discussion. Drone swarms are bound to play critical roles in upcoming conflicts, as already attested by Ukraine's destruction of Russia's black sea fleet. This is what can be done with COTS gear, but in the past few decades the US has been showing off glimpses of its drone-based war strategy and already showcased capabilities such as F16s deploying mid-air and commanding drone swarms. I also recall news reports of Ukraine also using adapted crop duster drones modified to serve as relay hubs and carry and drop-off FPV drones. Thus this capability is already present today, except the aircraft are unmanned.

Theodores3• 2 years ago

Superficially, my opinion makes me sound like a 'pootin properganhist'. However, my perspective is not that, I am a campaigner against the arms trade, and I would prefer to have the potholes fixed in the UK roads rather than potholes get made in the Donbass. I do not fetishise these stupid weapons of war, but I do count the bullets, with an outsider perspective.

Russia has the upper hand in the skies. They send out the drones, the Patriot systems shoot their load to get them down, the air defence is defeated and then the hypersonic missiles come in.

Sure, the UK/France have had some success taking down some of their Black Sea fleet but I think you are over-egging the pudding to claim 'destruction of the fleet', particularly when it is NATO shooting their very expensive missiles.

There is a long list of Western toys that you no longer hear about because they are not any more useful than any of the flying aircraft carriers. Things just get shot down all too easily. At the start they had those Turkish Bayraktar drones and they were seen as a serious weapon, nowadays nobody would send that junk into the sky. It is not just drones, things like HIMARS are now relegated to trash too. Remember Challenger 2, Bradley and whatever those French wheeled tanks were? Lancet FPV drones saw to them all. It was a complete waste of taxpayer money. And yes, I pay taxes.

This joke of sending F-16s has been going on for a while, with excuses about no pilots trained. They won't be deploying drone swarms with them, that is boy's comic fantasy stuff.

Neither side has the air superiority that NATO/USA/UK has when bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan. Things like the Baba-yaga crop duster drone are able to get some kills and NATO are able to FPV drone any tanks that Russia sends out into the open, but you never see Javelin or other wonder weapons these days, and they were designed for that job specifically.

Lives are lost in this conflict and at considerable economic cost. "Who started it" is not the point, we had that one a century ago with WW1. Why repeat the stupidity, for weapons fetish reasons?

kcrwfrd_• 2 years ago

Carrier has arrived!

taneq• 2 years ago

Better start massing stimmed 'rines and medics. :D

Solvency• 2 years ago

today, far more likely to have a mothership drone that shoots drones out.

t43562• 2 years ago

This A400M dropping a Do-DT25 for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQeEWi_dTSs

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

“The Lockheed CL-1201 was a design study by Lockheed for a giant 6,000 ton nuclear-powered transport aircraft in the late 1960s. One envisioned use of the concept was as an airborne aircraft carrier” [1]. (Also watch [2].)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-1201

[2] https://nebula.tv/videos/mustard-the-largest-aircraft-never-...

icegreentea2• 2 years ago

Another parasite fighter concept that actually got to prototype and flight phase was the XF-85 Goblin. It's... pretty adorable actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_XF-85_Goblin

dragonwriter4• 2 years ago

A parasite (reconnaissance focused, as a pivot from an original nuclear strike concept) fighter was briefly in operational service with the US: the RF-84K operating from modified B-36 Peacemaker bombers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FICON_project

runeofdoom• 2 years ago

There is (or was several years ago), one on display at the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum in Nebraska. You could walk right up to it. (As is the case with most of their aircraft.) Gloriously strange little aircraft.

pfdietz• 2 years ago

Admiral Moffett was killed in 1933 when the airship Akron crashed at sea. Moffett Field in California is named after him.

After airships were seen to be impractical, the navy switched its planning to use seaplanes. Originally intended also to be bombers (hence the PBY designation for "Patrol Bombers") they proved their worth in recon and rescue roles in WW2. Their ability to operate from unimproved islands (via seaplane tender ships) was somewhat overshadowed by the unforeseen speed with which the Seabees could build new forward airbases, and by the enormous expansion in US Navy aircraft carriers in the latter stages of the war.

kubanczyk• 2 years ago

Minor correction, while PB stood for Patrol Bomber, the Y was producer's code (Consolidated). For example Martin had PBM Mariner.

nox101• 2 years ago

Flying aircraft carriers always seemed like a particularly bad idea to me. Too fragile, a small amount of damage would knock them out of the sky. No?

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

Too fragile, a small amount of damage would knock them out of the sky. No?

No. Like regular aircraft carriers, you keep them far away from the battlefield. Their air wing flies in and ideally deploys weapons at range. (This works for the same reason staging rockets extends range.)

giantrobot2• 2 years ago

It doesn't really work though. An air wing needs fuel, munitions, and maintenance. The more of those things the airship carries, the smaller air wing it can carry.

You're not going to fit an air wing capable of meaningful missions on an airship. They couldn't even carry an air wing (and supplies) able to fly defensive CAP missions just to protect itself.

theiz• 2 years ago

Of all this amazing stuff, I learned today they were considering using solar panels on a zeppelin in 1936. I really though solar panels were from the 1980’s onwards.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

1876 for selenium based solar cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenium#Solar_cells

Silicon solar cells are/were massively more effective, and came to light just before their popularization in the space race.

dredmorbius3• 2 years ago

We have had flying aircraft carriers in practice and a far more viable form since the advent of air-launched missiles in 1947.

Today, as several other comments have noted, cargo aircraft launching drone swarms are the most likely future development (along with further missile development). Cargo aircraft have vast capacity in both mass and volume. Drones which dispense with the need to support a human pilot, and can operate one-way / kamakazi mode (though return flight is an option), and often have limited top speeds and ranges, make far more sense than a lightweight (and typically limited-capability) manned fighter or bomber.

Another line of nontraditional aircraft carriers are those based on submarines, with the Japanese deploying several during WWII (these enacted the only Japanese aerial attacks on the US mainland, near Santa Barbara and along the Oregon coast), and I believe there was a Soviet study (possibly 941-BIS) to develop a large-scale submarine aircraft carrier. As with airborne aircraft carriers, submarine-as-missile-launch-platform (ballistic or cruise) is far more practicable.

mgaunard• 2 years ago

kamikaze.

non-chalad2• 2 years ago

Divine wind?

dredmorbius3• 2 years ago

Gah, thanks, I should have spel-czeched that.

Most canonically: 神風

jauntywundrkind2• 2 years ago

Bear with me as I get to flying aircraft carriers...

Bending the rules here, but the line between aircraft and cruise missile and drone feels like it's flexing & bending to me. Cruise missiles like the JASSM-158C look a lot like an autonomous unmanned aircraft to me. DARPA has been continually working on this thing for a decade now, and their recent Integration Test Event 12 involved flying four of the already remarkably intelligent missile in formation to target. Not that they'll tell us exactly what went down here, but I rather expect that under-bids the magnitude of the mission and perhaps the inter-coordination of these missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-158C_LRASM https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2024-04-3-lockheed-martin-co...

Ok, so, I've somewhat convinced myself that missiles are now basically their own aircraft at this point. If you can consider that, then we do have flying carrier aircraft: the Rapid Dragon system palletizes the missiles, & has them dropped out of C-17 or C-130 aircraft. Not quite up to par with the proposed Boeing 747 Cruise Missile Carrier Aircraft (CMCA), but still pretty real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)

More contemporarily, I can definitely imagine, say, an attack helicopter that can deploy it's own small swarm of autonomous drones.

dragonwriter4• 2 years ago

Bending the rules here, but the line between aircraft and cruise missile and drone feels like it's flexing & bending to me.

Cruise missiles and (aerial) drones are both (unmanned) aircraft, and, yes, the lines between them essentially don't exist any more (especially since exoendable loitering munitions started being called “drones”, before which I would have argued drones are recoverable and cruise missiles / loitering munitions are expended in use and not intended to be recovered normally.)

But usually when we talk about an “aircraft carrier”, we are usually talking about something that carries and recovers aircraft (eepecially manned aircraft), not just something that launches but does not recover expendable munitions.

Other B-52s with air launched cruise mkssiles (and, heck, any plane carrying missiles) would be an “aircraft carrier”.

reaperman• 2 years ago

Even blurrier when the "unmanned" aircraft can be remotely controlled by a pilot in Las Vegas. Not manned, but still human-piloted.

jauntywundrkind2• 2 years ago

I saw that distinction too & there's a lot of validity to it.

But, I have no doubt a agm-158c could hypothetically go fly off, scout around, come back, and probably even have fine motor controls to fly close & get captured by some kind of dock.

Grizzly to point this out, but also not all aircrafts in history have been designed to survive engagements. We don't say a Kamikaze suicide bomber isn't an aircraft because it doesnt land. We are however calling Ukraine's Aeroprakt A-22 based drone a drone, even though it's literally an aircraft airframe.

But in general that there's a lot of things that could potentially be seen as aircraft carriers, as drones and missiles start to behave closer on the spectrum to aircrafts than to pure missiles. The distinctions of intelligence & sensing seems pretty arbitrary, but it also seems IMHO that the behavior of this lower class of flying system has bent upwards to more resemble it's bigger historically manned/piloted counterpart.

BMc2020• 2 years ago

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Missile Gap by Charles Stross

Yuri Gagarin captains a huge, nuclear-powered Ekranoplan on behalf of the Soviets

Set on a sort of alternate Earth in a sort of alternate 1986, The Ekranoplan is so huge it has a runway long enough for Mig fighters on top.

When he is given the mission by the Russian Premier, he is told to "boldly go where no soviet man has gone before."

rekoros• 2 years ago

This is so weird - I just finished watching "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" on Max, then opened HN, and flying aircraft carriers is #1. How does HN know what I'm watching on Max??

nikolaj• 2 years ago

how could they forget to mention the Talespin Iron Vulture when talking fictional versions!.. that will always be my vision of a flying aircraft carrier!

https://talespin.fandom.com/wiki/Iron_Vulture

archi42• 2 years ago

Thanks, I wanted to point out the exact same glaring omission. Unbelievable! :')

mrwubbzy2• 2 years ago

theres people working on this now https://www.reddit.com/r/FromTheDepths/comments/ouckug/ussr_...

mrwubbzy2• 2 years ago

ekranoplan aircraft carriers go hard https://www.reddit.com/r/FromTheDepths/comments/ouckug/ussr_...

mcmoor• 2 years ago

Flying Aircraft Carrier never make sense to me. It needs some kind of weird technology or economy of scale that allows the carrier to float more easily than the thing it carries by its own. Because otherwise, why don't the carried plane employ the same technology and ditch the carrier entirely?

Zeppelin used to be that because it can stay in the air more indefinitely while sacrificing almost everything else (speed, maneuverability, etc) but when planes beat it at even that, zeppelin usability just disappears.

webdoodle• 2 years ago

Pilots have to sleep, eat and shit like the rest of us. Doing so in a flight suit stuck in a pilots seat isn't very practical for more than a day or so. A flying aircraft carrier would allow most of the pilots to a least take a shower and stretch there legs.

swader999• 2 years ago

It'll happen with drones. A cargo plane launching a swarm or something like that, maybe a starship even. Likely won't come back I'd imagine.

lettergram• 2 years ago

They missed the part where the Soviet Union actually flew missions with their flying air craft carriers.

https://youtu.be/IjCylxs8hZU?feature=shared

They were largely successful too.

GartzenDeHaes2• 2 years ago

Another cool fictional flying carrier is the Banshee from the anime Yukikaze https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MBSrqypm2M

decafninja• 2 years ago

Lovely aircraft designs for the FAF, though the enemy fighters look like they ran out of art budget and look like flying Cybertrucks.

But the story completely confused me. I have no idea what’s going on. Maybe the novels have more detail?

Tom Cruise was supposed to do a live action adaptation IIRC.

GartzenDeHaes2• 2 years ago

flying Cybertrucks

Ha, yeah now that you mention it.

Tom Cruise was supposed to do a live action adaptation IIRC

He already did All You Need Is Kill (Edge of Tomorrow), so I wouldn't be surprised.

I have no idea what’s going on

I had to watch it a few times to figure it out. It's a human misunderstanding that a war is going on. The JAM are a machine race that seem to be conducting experiments to understand the biological components of the Earth machines.

cratermoon• 2 years ago

The article mentions nuclear-powered aircraft, but doesn't go into much detail. There were two reactors built, HTRE-2, and HTRE-3. They're currently on display, sitting on railroad flatcars in Idaho, sitting next to the parking lot of the Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-I).

zubairq• 2 years ago

Some amazing images of the future looking at these flying aircraft carriers! Makes me think of when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s and looking at magazines where everything looked bright in the future!

MrDresden• 2 years ago

The Youtube/Nebula creator 'Mustard' has been mentioned a few times here already, and rightfully so as their videos have really high production values and obviously plenty of research behind them.

Since I don't see it linked, they also made an excellent video[0] on the real life soviet aircraft mothership Tupolev TB1/TB3 which is mentioned in the OP article.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjCylxs8hZU

NohatCoder2• 2 years ago

None of the airship concept art in that article looks like it passes a simple weight-to-lift ratio check. Real airships have a tiny usable compartment relative to the total size of the vessel, and everything is optimised for weight.

And sure, carrying one, or a few small planes is possible. But real combat planes are heavier, they require more fuel, ammunition is heavy, especially if we want something beyond basic machine gun rounds. And of course we will need crew, including life support. Leaving the planes hanging under the belly is no good if we want to do basically any kind of maintenance, even loading ammunition could be tricky in this position. But an indoor hangar, and mechanisms for getting planes in and out is just more weight. Realistically we will end up with way fewer and smaller planes than any seaborne aircraft carrier can support.

There are suggestions of adding something reminiscent of ship deck guns, but there is no way we have weight budget for that with all the planes, and I doubt the frame of the whole ship is actually rigid enough to absorb the shock of firing a big cannon. I think some light machine gun placements will have to do.

We also got the suggestion of the whole thing flying so high that it would be out of range of land-based AA weapons. That sounds neat, but the higher we want to fly, the less lift we get per volume, and we already spend a good part of the lift on just the hull, engines and fuel, we can't actually go terribly high before the number of planes supported drops to 0.

But for all this trouble, we will get a fortress in the sky! A fortress made of balsa wood and paper-thin skin that is. Minor bullet holes is one thing, the helium leaks really really slowly. But say someone drops a fire bomb on top of the hull, helium rushing out might extinguish the fire, but not until there is already a pretty big hole for that helium to rush out through. Basically our carrier is really big, really expensive, and really easy to hit.

throwthrowuknow• 2 years ago

Oddly enough this is why a heli-carrier is more realistic given a suitable power plant. Granted that power plant would have to be some kind of sci-fi nuclear fission or fusion reactor. Perhaps you could combine the two concepts and add hydrogen lift cells that would also serve as a hand wavy storage / expansion chamber for the hydrogen fuel used in the fusion reactor.

Although if you are going all in on scifi concepts you might as well make it an orbital aircraft carrier that launches scramjet fighters capable of descending from orbit and then boosting back up to dock.

Flying Aircraft Carriers (2019)

Related Stories