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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.)
Cruise ships are a terrible way to get quickly to a destination, but they're not a bad way to travel.
Comparing airships to first class air travel isn't the right basis. You want to compare to trains and ships at least. You take a ship or train when speed isn't the objective, rather experience. An airship experience with a few dozen passengers taking tours of beautiful scenery over the course of a coastal trip, or like a group hot air balloon, or something like that.
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.
Or, rather, before carbon fiber, kevlar, very strong plastic films, etc.
A modern airship can be made much lighter while also being sturdier and somehow structurally redundant. But its sheer size still makes it expensive.
The only relatively operational development I'm aware of is Airlander, and it's still a prototype, since the US Army rejected it.
The size is part of the problem. An airship's huge size means it has a gigantic sail area. Weather that can't be avoided becomes super dangerous. Even a gentle crosswind during take off or landing could be disastrous.
> I'd bet they'd all be safe today by simply not moving into weather systems.
It will be safe but of less use than other aircraft/transport that can work in bad weather, or can wait out in a hangar or get in and out of a bad weather system quickly.
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.
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.
Depends on the aircraft, some small planes are basically stall-free, as long as they have sufficient height they can recover using the speed gained by falling.
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.
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.
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.
While not technically an aircraft carrier but capable of carrying, launching and landing aircraft, the example of USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) comes to mind:
On 12 July 2020, a fire started on a lower vehicle-storage deck while the ship was undergoing maintenance at Naval Base San Diego. It took four days for firefighters to extinguish the fire, which injured at least 63 sailors and civilians and severely damaged the ship. After a lengthy investigation into the cause of the fire, a sailor was charged with arson but was acquitted at trial. Repairs to the ship were estimated to take up to seven years and cost up to $3.2 billion, so the ship was decommissioned on 15 April 2021 and sold for scrap.
Yes, the notion of an airship as aircraft carrier was really only viable for a short time when aircraft engine technology wasn't good enough for high-altitude flight.
With the incorporation of superchargers and turbochargers in aircraft engines (and an overall increase in power), this drastically increased the altitude limits for propeller aircraft.
When the airships could still fly higher than aircraft, that reduced their vulnerability to direct attack.
An airship however is way easier to shoot down using non military technology that some nutjob group could afford. They're slow, big and a lot less armored than ships, and they'd make the news if shot down, which is what the above actors are after; in this world I don't see them like a safe solution for transportation.
In the context of aircraft carriers it probably is never a good idea to have them directly at the front. If it is close enough to be shot down by a Texan wielding a sawed of shotgun it probably is too close to the front. Same is true for the ship kind, if you can walk up to it with a welder and cut holes into its armor plating it is too close.
In the context of transportation planes seem to have significant issues dealing with loons wielding laser pointers. So unless you classify those as military technology you will have a hard time finding something cheaper and easier to get your hands on.
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.
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.
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.
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?
While I don't think it detracts from your position that perhaps funds would be better spent at home fixing domestic issues approaching crisis, you don't really seem to be that up-to-date about developments in the war. I suggest you write to a local MP and ask to meet with them about accounting for equipment losses of loaned equipment - it is intensively well documented, to try to avoid corruption. All MPs have access to the full papers on request.
Challenger 2 tanks, for example, have only had one loss as far as i'm aware. They've mainly been used in a short-range artillery role, firing at field fortifications from 3km or so away, a role in which i've heard they are considered capable. They cannot operate in a frontline role, no tank on either side has or can.
HIMARS has singlehandedly caused a full russian shift in tactics, placing their fuel depots, ammunition dumps, and supply lines more than 100km away from the front line, which has contributed massively to their ongoing supply issues.
Yes, evolution of tactics of drone warfare has changed the face of the battle considerably, leaving some weapons less useful. They would also be useless in the hands of our own millitary. They have already been paid for, there is no "spending", we are literally sending kit that the regular army has had for decades to the frontlines. If it proves useless, then we can be glad that the ukranians found that out for us.
Yes, some equipment is lost in war. It's perhaps worth noting that a weapon used in combat and lost is a much more worthwhile one than something sitting in storage and brought out once a year for training. That scenario, to me, is "weapons fetishism", and contributes to inane cost bloat.
Way off the main thread, however, they did not send the best Challenger 2 tanks, they sent the ones with the limited ammunition supply that use the old gun. Only one was ever spotted in the wild, that did not last long. The idea was that with Leopard tanks, those Abrams, Bradley and French things, Zelensky would be seeing the sea again in the Crimea, some time in summer 2023. A very small dent in the Surovkin Line was made near Rabotino and that was about all the Great Summer Offensive amounted to.
With HIMARS there was a problem with shooting down the missiles and taking out the launchers, but Russia got there in the end. That is why they are now using Vampire instead. They also ran out of ammo for HIMARS and had to switch up to cluster weapons, which resulted in the Russians bringing out their own cluster weapons.
The entire front is only moving one way, west. This has been at a cost of many thousands of lives, sent to this meat grinder that benefits only the arms companies.
> 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.
Patriot is not used to shoot down drones.
> Why repeat the stupidity, for weapons fetish reasons?
It's a good reminder that Ukraine has no wish for this war.
We are way off the original post here, however, Russia sends the Soviet Era (cruise) missiles out as decoys for taking out the air defence, whilst stocks last.
Who is Ukraine anyway? They don't have elections and the people supplying the weapons tend to have residence in London and Washington. They certainly wish for war. In April 2022 'Ukraine' was ready to sign on the dotted line for a peace deal brokered by Turkey but Boris Johnson flew out and nixed the deal. This is documented, so, in a way, you are right, and on both accounts.
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.
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_LRASMhttps://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.
> 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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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].)
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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??
> 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.)
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.
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.
1. https://www.aerodex.org/
https://www.wateredplants.com/
Featured in Indiana Jones the Last crusade, game and movie: https://youtu.be/s0vNsH81YeA?t=119
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27AAlYlyvZs has the plane leaving the Zeppelin.
[1]: https://oceanskycruises.com/
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.)
Comparing airships to first class air travel isn't the right basis. You want to compare to trains and ships at least. You take a ship or train when speed isn't the objective, rather experience. An airship experience with a few dozen passengers taking tours of beautiful scenery over the course of a coastal trip, or like a group hot air balloon, or something like that.
not sure if that's the case with HSR
I'd bet they'd all be safe today by simply not moving into weather systems.
A modern airship can be made much lighter while also being sturdier and somehow structurally redundant. But its sheer size still makes it expensive. The only relatively operational development I'm aware of is Airlander, and it's still a prototype, since the US Army rejected it.
Airships have pretty surprisingly low service ceilings, and experience a huge trade-off in payload capacity (by weight) vs. operating altitude.
It will be safe but of less use than other aircraft/transport that can work in bad weather, or can wait out in a hangar or get in and out of a bad weather system quickly.
It never occurred to me to question whether that was historically accurate (it looks very straightforward 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.
Which means on the wind, and modern hydro aircraft carriers do the same.
"Match speed" seems like a thing that's really easy to write and much harder to actually do :)
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.
While by no means a proper simulator, it certainly makes a fun arcade and sci-fi shooter experience.
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.
On 12 July 2020, a fire started on a lower vehicle-storage deck while the ship was undergoing maintenance at Naval Base San Diego. It took four days for firefighters to extinguish the fire, which injured at least 63 sailors and civilians and severely damaged the ship. After a lengthy investigation into the cause of the fire, a sailor was charged with arson but was acquitted at trial. Repairs to the ship were estimated to take up to seven years and cost up to $3.2 billion, so the ship was decommissioned on 15 April 2021 and sold for scrap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6)
They don't deal with rough weather well, though.
With the incorporation of superchargers and turbochargers in aircraft engines (and an overall increase in power), this drastically increased the altitude limits for propeller aircraft.
When the airships could still fly higher than aircraft, that reduced their vulnerability to direct attack.
In the context of transportation planes seem to have significant issues dealing with loons wielding laser pointers. So unless you classify those as military technology you will have a hard time finding something cheaper and easier to get your hands on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_XF-85_Goblin
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FICON_project
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.
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?
Challenger 2 tanks, for example, have only had one loss as far as i'm aware. They've mainly been used in a short-range artillery role, firing at field fortifications from 3km or so away, a role in which i've heard they are considered capable. They cannot operate in a frontline role, no tank on either side has or can.
HIMARS has singlehandedly caused a full russian shift in tactics, placing their fuel depots, ammunition dumps, and supply lines more than 100km away from the front line, which has contributed massively to their ongoing supply issues.
Yes, evolution of tactics of drone warfare has changed the face of the battle considerably, leaving some weapons less useful. They would also be useless in the hands of our own millitary. They have already been paid for, there is no "spending", we are literally sending kit that the regular army has had for decades to the frontlines. If it proves useless, then we can be glad that the ukranians found that out for us.
Yes, some equipment is lost in war. It's perhaps worth noting that a weapon used in combat and lost is a much more worthwhile one than something sitting in storage and brought out once a year for training. That scenario, to me, is "weapons fetishism", and contributes to inane cost bloat.
With HIMARS there was a problem with shooting down the missiles and taking out the launchers, but Russia got there in the end. That is why they are now using Vampire instead. They also ran out of ammo for HIMARS and had to switch up to cluster weapons, which resulted in the Russians bringing out their own cluster weapons.
The entire front is only moving one way, west. This has been at a cost of many thousands of lives, sent to this meat grinder that benefits only the arms companies.
Patriot is not used to shoot down drones.
> Why repeat the stupidity, for weapons fetish reasons?
It's a good reminder that Ukraine has no wish for this war.
Who is Ukraine anyway? They don't have elections and the people supplying the weapons tend to have residence in London and Washington. They certainly wish for war. In April 2022 'Ukraine' was ready to sign on the dotted line for a peace deal brokered by Turkey but Boris Johnson flew out and nixed the deal. This is documented, so, in a way, you are right, and on both accounts.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most canonically: 神風
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-1201
[2] https://nebula.tv/videos/mustard-the-largest-aircraft-never-...
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.
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."
https://talespin.fandom.com/wiki/Iron_Vulture
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
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.
https://youtu.be/IjCylxs8hZU?feature=shared
They were largely successful too.
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.
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.
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.)
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.