Sorry to tell you but it's not. You should listen to the mods.
00X/004 future nuclear CATOBAR carrier thread
- Thread starter AETHER
- Start date
In the absence of further news, just a bit more speculation on 004 likely outline/size.
I would expect with such a wide carrier that at least the cat 4 launch position would be outside the port side foul line of the landing strip, but it looks like it's still sitting inside the foul line.
proelite
Junior Member
Simultaneous launch and recovery are extremely rare. One cat for that is enough.
Well, "rare" nowadays because the USN doesn't need to run flight ops at such a pace to take out roving bands of insurgents armed with AK-47s. If the USN were in the midst of a bare-knuckle fist fight with the PLAN, I'm thinking they would absolutely do this as much as they could safely (or even unsafely) get away with. BTW cat 4 on both the Nimitz and the Ford has the space to park a plane while another one is landing. And 1 and 2, of course.
proelite
Junior Member
High-pace flight ops require cyclical launch and recovery. WW2 carrier ops involved many more planes and that was completely cyclical.
A plane's launch takes less than 2 minutes. That's 2 minutes out of a cycle of several hours. You can just have landing planes hold in the air for a few minutes while planes launch.
If WWII carriers can launch and recovery at the same time, IJN would have won the Midway.
WW2 carriers did not have angled flight decks and thus by necessity their flight ops were cyclical. It's also telling that 3 out of 4 cats on the Nimitz and Ford conspicuously avoid the foul lines of the landing strip. They wouldn't bother to do that if they didn't actually have plans to use 3 out of 4 cats while simultaneously conducting landing operations if and when called on to do so.
It's reasonable to say that there may be benefits in very specific situations to having some launch positions which do not run afoul of the landing strip, but there is also no evidence to suggest that high intensity carrier operations would not also be cyclical (and thus, have few benefits to exploit the theoretical feature of being able to recover an aircraft at short notice even if an adjacent launch position is spotted with an aircraft).
Cyclical carrier operations matured during WWII, but they did not somehow pause during the Cold War (when high intensity air-naval conflict with the USSR was one of the major missions USN carriers of course trained for) and re-emerge in the post Cold War era to conduct low intensity sorties. Cyclical operations continued during the Cold War as well.
In time a different method of organizing carrier flight operations in all regimes (including high intensity conflict) might occur, but for now there should be every expectation that the PLAN will continue to emulate the proven method of cyclical flight operations for their current and future carriers (and to gain further efficiencies with a bigger flight deck and further iterative improvements of flight deck organization).
I consider the "is an adjacent launch position on the landing strip or not" as a "neat if present, but largely indifferent".
proelite
Junior Member
Actually on the Ford, 2 of the 4 cats are in the landing area, 1 is touching the foul line.
