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How the plane came aboard the ship

America’s first experiences with the use of ship launched aircraft were made during the American Civil War where both sides launched balloons for reconnaissance duties.

Ely launches from the deck of USS BIRMINGHAMThe first serious efforts to develop an aircraft able to operate from ships were started in 1908 when Captain W. S. Cowles created a ship based plane. But he was not the only person thinking about this problem. Wilbur Wright himself hesitated when a forward-thinking Navy Department asked him to fly one of his aero-planes from the deck of a naval vessel in the fall of 1910. Another aviation pioneer, Eugene Ely, jumped at the opportunity. In November of that year Ely, wrapped in bicycle inner tubes for floatation and wearing a leather football helmet, boldly rolled his 50-horsepower Curtiss pusher down a sloping wooden platform built on the light cruiser USS BIRMINGHAM, lightly bounced off the water, and flew into the history books as the first to fly from the deck of a ship. Captain Washington Irving Chambers, the Navy s first Chief of Aeronautics, was sufficiently impressed to call for another demonstration two months later aboard the battleship USS PENNSYLVANIA, anchored in San Francisco bay. This time Ely squared the circle by first landing his machine aboard the ship, stopping it with a series of sandbagged ropes across the wooden platform. After refueling, he and his Navy assistants turned this first "carrier" aircraft around and Ely safely flew it back to shore.

World War I brought a glimpse of the revolutionary changes aircraft would bring to warfare; with their potential to expand naval combat into the skies, experimentation with aircraft at sea took on a new urgency. Although initial naval emphasis was on gunfire spotting for the battleships, many saw the potential of a sea-based air arm acting in an offensive role. In 1922 the Navy converted the collier JUPITER into the first aircraft carrier by building a full length wooden platform over the hull and re- commissioning it as USS LANGLEY (CV-1). LANGLEY’s successful operational developments persuaded naval leaders to continue to push the edges of aviation technology and strategy.

The 1920s also saw the conversion of two battle cruisers, LEXINGTON and SARATOGA, into aircraft carriers. After confirming their value as battleship scouts, the two carriers spent a great portion of the interwar years developing the radical doctrine of a multi-carrier task force operating as an autonomous offensive unit. Among their more dramatic exercises were long range carrier aircraft strikes on U.S. bases in both the Panama Canal Zone and Pearl Harbor.

America's battleship fleet was virtually destroyed by the Japanese carrier attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, the carrier tactics and doctrines developed through the 1930 s became the cornerstone of the United States Pacific war strategy. The carriers themselves benefited from continuous improvement in hangar and flight deck arrangements, arresting gear and catapult equipment, and shipboard speed, maneuverability and survivability. The early combat lessons from the losses of LEXINGTON and YORKTOWN were immediately translated into design improvements in the new ESSEX and later MIDWAY classes of fleet carriers. Perhaps the most far-reaching success of the war effort was the ability of American industry to produce these invaluable ships with astonishing alacrity; Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company, for example, built eight ESSEX class carriers with an average construction time of just over 17 months.

After the war naval designers made a giant technological leap with the construction of the FORRESTAL class of "super carriers." Designed specifically to handle large, heavy jet aircraft , the new ships featured powerful steam catapults, an integrated angled flight deck landing area, four large deck edge elevators, extensive armor, dedicated weapons elevators, and built-in fire fighting capability among other features. FORRESTAL’s layout was subsequently improved by the KITTY HAWK class (rearranging the aircraft elevators and island), and the KITTY HAWK design became the basis for the current ships of the nuclear powered NIMITZ class.



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