Just my outstanding sense of humor. It was a joke of course.
Type 076 LHD/LHA discussion
- Thread starter banjex
- Start date
If the Chinese navy is going to launch aircraft that require a catapult such as the one that the 76 seems to have then that aircraft will need to be recovered back to the ship. The Chinese will not throw away an aircraft after a single use. A conventional take off allied with a very short or vertical landing capability seems to be the only possibility absent evidence of an angled deck and arrestors. The most difficult part of an air mission off of a carrier is the initial launch when fuel and weapons are being carried but once those have been expended at mission end then perhaps landing an aircraft with only a little fuel and no weapons and therefore weighing a lot less than at takeoff, may be, probably is, a much easier task to design a vertical or extremely short landing solution for. Perhaps we will be surprised by a new high performance unmanned platform designed to operate from this new ship appearing in the not too distant future.
No STOVL aircraft is more capable than a cat-launched aircraft of the same size. This is an built-in disadvantage of vertical landing enforced by physics.
Besides that, the cat allows you to launch other aircraft types that cannot be fitted with VTOL systems like AWACS and COD.
If you want to launch aircraft, the cat is a far better solution than developing a STOVL ac.
One Catapult. Great, who need redundancies right?A bigger version.
