A Brief History of Aircraft Carriers

An aircraft carrier acts as a seagoing airbase. The aircraft carrier was designed for one thing; it was designed for deploying and recovering aircrafts. It allows the navy to go great distances and not have to rely on local bases to for staging aircraft missions.

Aircrafts have come a long way when they first started to use them they were used to deploy balloons. Now they are nuclear warships that are able to carry dozens of fixed and rotary wing aircraft.

In the article we are going to discuss how the aircrafts have evolved. From the first aircraft to the strong ones they are today. The first ships that deployed a manned aircraft were the balloon carriers. They were used during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. During this time it was mainly used for just observation.

The development of flat top vessels produced the first large fleet ships. During World War II was when the need for the these type of ships. There were ships that were built just for WWII. For example one of them was the Escort aircraft carriers and the USS Bogue. Some of these ships were built just for carriers, but most were just converted. They were converted from merchant ships as a stop -gap measure so that they could provide air support for the convoys and amphibious invasions.

There were light aircraft carriers it was a larger more militarized version of the escort carrier. The light aircrafts had a great advantage to the escort carriers they could carry the same size air groups and they were also able to move at a higher speed.

There were Merchant carriers these could launch but they could not for retrieve fighter aircraft from an attack. The merchant carrier was used as an emergency measure during the World War II. There were other emergency methods that was used which was they used cargo carrying merchant ships with flight decks.

The modern Navy now uses the aircraft carriers as the "capital ship" of the fleet. When before the battleship was considered the "capital ship". Having the ability to have such great power in the air is a great tool to have during the time of war. This became really popular during WWII. Most of the aircraft carriers are powered by nuclear reactors and form the core of a fleet designed to operate far from home.

Since then the aircraft carriers have only gotten bigger and stronger. Today there is Supercarriers which can now able to displace seventy five thousand tons or greater.

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