Plane aircraft carrier
Posted by kill_stalin11@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 29 comments
I was talking to a friend and he asked:”can a plane aircraft carrier exist?”. I thought about it some days and I think that the could exist. The jet could take off from the upper deck(like the “space shuttle” on the Antonov 225). The jet could easily take off beacause it also has the inertia from the flying “aircraft carrier. What do you think about this ideas?
Sorry for my English, I’m not British or American
CT-1065@reddit
there was a concept for a 747 to carry small fighter jets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_aircraft_carrier
kill_stalin11@reddit (OP)
So the idea is not that bad in the end…
SirLoremIpsum@reddit
Depends on what you mean by "bad"...
An Aircraft carrier is very useful because you can take dozens and dozens of Jets from US West Coast across the Pacific, hang out "around" the theater and drop bombs / fly sorties for weeks. This provides a mobile base from which to launch aircraft.
A flying Carrier can not do that. It must land at some point. You can refuel jets, but carrying them long term, maintaining them - you just cant do that with a flying carrier.
You can however air launch planes like the X-15, experimental planes designed to be launched while in atmosphere negates a lot of fuel required. Could be useful for space.
There are many new cruise missiles, loitering munitions that get air launched that is (by some definition I'm sure) a flying carrier.
Kinder22@reddit
My favorite not that bad version of this is the nuclear powered one.
vini_damiani@reddit
Its preeeeetty bad, once you consider you can achieve the exact same thing by just having a tanker aircraft refuel your planes half way, you can have the same range in theory but actually much longer in practice cause in general larger aircraft are more fuel efficient and you can just keep launching tankers along the route for a basically infinite flight time and range
Also one lucky SAM or even just any malfunction on the plane kills an entire fighter wing its extremely risky
Also the mother ship range would be cut short a ton too because of the added weight for the extra planes, fuel and munitions, without even considering defenses
A drone mothership or a cruise missile launch platform begins to make much more sense tho, which is why the b52 and other large bombers can launch them
rhit06@reddit
See also project Tip-Tow with wingtip attached parasitic fighters: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boeing_B-29_TomTom.jpg
Festivefire@reddit
There was also the program to use B-36s as motherships to carry RF-84s to extend their range.
devildog2067@reddit
I mean, define “bad”. There’s a reason why we don’t have any in active service today.
It’s not physically impossible, but it’s not a good idea. It doesn’t work.
CT-1065@reddit
I think it has its niche use cases, like being able to drop some defense fighters out of the bomber to protect the bomber... but to me it lived on in the form of conventional aerial refueling, that way you're not compromising on fighter size to fit in the carrier aircraft, but can also still pull up and extend their range.
torsten_dev@reddit
It's not a bad idea in the sense that smart people have toyed around with the concept as well.
It is a bad idea in the sense that those attempts have not lead to much.
mfsnyder1985@reddit
There have been some feasibility tests done with this, namely the X85 Goblin being launched from a B-36. Nothing ever operational though
GGCRX@reddit
But man, that Goblin is wild to see in person. It's like someone washed an F86 on hot. Smart car with wings.
Getting something that twitchy hooked back onto the trapeze must have been one hell of a clincher
Js987@reddit
It is possible, just not terribly cost effective. It’s actually been done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_White_Knight
The B-52 also served as a launcher for the X-15 rocket plane, and there were various concept designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_aircraft_carrier
LoneGhostOne@reddit
Don't forget the Goblin parasite fighter!
CBT7commander@reddit
For a second I thought you meant "an aircraft carrier that could carry planes" and was very, very confused
But to answer your question: it has already been thought off. The issue is that they would be too hard to maintain resupply and defend.
Being in the air removes the natural protection a ship gets by being on the water (which makes it harder to find and also protected by the curvature of the earth). It also makes it harder to defend, because carriers have massive escorts with them. You’d have to design a plane to replace the carrier, but also the cruisers and destroyers escorting it.
Lastly, it would be much harder to resupply. Even assuming nuclear power, the fighters on board would still need fuel. Refueling it one KC130 load at a time would be nightmarish, both in danger and cost. A single failed refuel and you have your carrier collide with a kc130 mid air. That would be bad.
In general everything about a carrier is easier to perform while on the water. The advantages offered by a plane version would simply be outweighed by the costs
Separate-Fishing-361@reddit
It would probably be feasible to launch and recover drones, as long as the drones could match speeds with the aircraft. The drone would need to be designed for the purpose and relatively light, e.g., rechargeable with folding wings.
Once you eliminate the need for a pilot and heavy weapons, the resulting drone could be fairly small.
Raccoon_Ratatouille@reddit
Yes, it’s been done in the past but that doesn’t mean it’s practical or effective
DBond2062@reddit
The question is why? The only thing that limits modern jets is fuel, and we have tankers for that. No need to land and take off again.
RosieDear@reddit
They already do in a sense. Ukraine is regularly using larger drones to launch 4-8 smaller drones.
ImTheJewgernaut@reddit
The US and UK did actually service flying carriers for a bit using zeppelins. Notabley the USS Akron and USS Macon on the US side, and the 23-Class on the British side.
The Russians were the first to field actual aircraft carrying aircraft in conflict with the Zveno project.
60TP@reddit
It’s called the CL-1201
Kanyiko@reddit
It has been done... as long as 90 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtazEBQ1K8
The Short Mayo Composite of 1937 was a combination of two seaplanes - a large 'launcher' aircraft and a smaller, long-range mailplane. When fully loaded with its cargo and fuel, the mailplane was unable to take off under its own power; to allow it to take off, it was mounted atop a larger seaplane - a mothership - whose only purpose was to carry the smaller one into the sky. With their combined engine power, the combination could take off; once airborne and at altitude, the two would separate, with the mothership returning to base and the mailplane would continue to its destination.
The Soviets had been working on a similar experiment but with military applications. The Zveno project was a composite aircraft existing of a Tupolev TB heavy bomber and a number of parasite fighters. The Tupolev TB had a large carrying capacity but a relatively low speed which made it obsolete fairly quickly - it couldn't outrun fighters, and it was too slow to bomb heavily defended targets. Meanwhile, the Polikarpov I-16 fighter had a tremendous speed (for its time) but could not take off with heavy bombs, nor did it have the range of the TB. The Zveno project combined the TB bomber with a number of carried aircraft - Zveno combinations saw TB bombers fitted with anything ranging from two fighters (suspended from the wings) to five (three carried on top in addition to the two suspended ones. When taking off, the parasite aircraft's engines added to those of the TB to carry the combination into the sky, and their wings added lift. While both the TB and I-16 were obsolete by the time the Second World War arrived, the Soviets used the Zveno combination with success early in the war: they would have a TB take off carrying two bomb-carrying I-16s, and launch them near their target; the faster and nimble I-16s would perform a precision bombing of the target, while the lumbering TB remained out of the heavily defended area around the target. Afterwards, they would separately make their way back to base.
The losses of unescorted bombers in the Second World War, combined with the short-ranged nature of early jet fighters, led the US to develop its own parasite project in the mid-1940s. This saw the XF-85 Goblin emerge - a compact jet fighter that could be carried inside the bomb bay of a bomber, and that could be launched close to the target to provide fighter cover for the bomber during its attack. The only problem was that Goblin was very short-ranged so it not only needed to be launched, but also picked up again by its mothership, and that was where problems began. The airflow around the bomber provided a lot of turbulence for the smaller parasite fighter, and this made docking both difficult and dangerous. After a number of accidents and near-disaster, the project was abandoned, but not before lessons were drawn. It resulted in what would become the FICON project: a concept where a large mothership bomber would carry a parasite nuclear attack aircraft, which would be released at a distance of the target and then do a high-speed pass over the target, releasing its bomb before returning to be picked up by the bomber and flown home. While it was never used as such, the USAF did modify a number of reconnaissance aircraft in this way for intelligence gathering over the Soviet Union, however these encountered the same coupling difficulties as the Goblin had before - and when the long-range, high-altitude U-2 spy plane entered service, the FICON project was quietly abandoned.
Valder137@reddit
The idea has been around since the 40s tbf
JBN2337C@reddit
Cruise missiles are kinda the equivalent now. A bomber can carry many of the little mini “airplanes”, and launch from a standoff distance.
Concepts are in place to have drones fly alongside fighters, with the manned jet acting as the “mothership” so to speak (it just doesn’t carry the drones.)
scotgrouse@reddit
Yes - see the the 1937 Short Mayo Composite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Mayo_Composite
Icy-Ninja-622@reddit
This has been done with airships and fixed wing aircraft. One use case was fighters carried by bombers, for defending the bombers outside of the range of ground based fighters. It has never been practical enough for widespread use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_aircraft
euph_22@reddit
The also considered using the parasite fighter to deliver nukes. The lumbering bomber would get close to the target then the fast fighter would dart in and actually deliver a bomb (and then presumably the bomber can deliver follow on strikes).
Soggy_Quarter9333@reddit
Chuck Yeager wants a word.
DoubleThinkCO@reddit
Soviets actually did it in WWII. Good video on it here from a great channel
https://youtu.be/IjCylxs8hZU?si=InTa4e7ZGaxlkCdS