How Aircraft Carriers Work: Part Two

almost like you've never left. It's almost like I never right, So, so yeah, if you listen to our last episode, if you haven't listened to our last episode, you should listen to that one first, because that's where we really cover the basics of aircraft carriers. And this episode we're going to look more at the various types of aircraft carriers, sort of the how the history of aircraft carriers in

the United States has unfolded. Yeah. Yeah, the class system, so the way that they're all designated and the way that they the way that the whole evolution of the aircraft carriers coming about here in the United States. Yeah, yeah, especially you know when you get into World War two and you and you see how it becomes a pivotal UH part of the Navy during World War two and then changes again just a few years later as jet fighters become a reality. It's really fascinating stuff. So I

hope you enjoy. Now you want to talk about a few numbers here, because let's let's please we can do these numbers and in our articles as big numbers, and these are big numbers, and some of these will pertain to what we were just talking about. Others are just kind of coming out of nowhere. But um, okay, this is talking about the Nimitz class aircraft carrier. So that's the current aircraft carrier that is being used by the United States Navy that will be eventually replaced by the

Ford class once that comes online. All right, So the total height from keel to mast is two and forty four feet. That's as high as the twenty four story building. As we mentioned earlier in the podcast. The weight in full combat mode seven thousand tons. That's that's a lot of that, sure is. And I'll go through these quickly so we can just get through them. But the weight of the structural steal alone sixty thousand tons just in

steel on that ship. That's not including all the all the aircraft and the people and all the other stuff. The total area of the flight deck. I think we said this already four and a half acres. The length of the flight deck one thousand, ninety two ft. But again, they don't get to use all of that. Some of it's for launching, some of it's for recovery. Uh it's it's broken up into different ways, some of it's for storage.

The width of the flight deck and it's the widest point two fifty seven ft wide, which sounds wide, but then again, you've got planes, you've got people, you've got the pilot house, pilotouse, that the island island, that's right, pilot house wherey come up with that? It sounds like a restaurant. Well you you would technically call it that on a boat, but this is significantly larger than a boat. I'm gonna go down to the pilot house for some shrimp. Okay,

uh oh, this is interesting. The weight of each anchor, each anchor thirty tons, and in each each link in the section of anchor chain weighs three hundred and sixty pounds massive a couple of people just to lift the look. Each propeller weighs sixty six thousand, two hundred pounds. Each of the rudders weighs four sorry, forty five point five tons. Yeah,

that's amazing. Um, all right, how about the storage capacity for aviation fuel, which we would assume would be essential for something like this Because they're not making power from the the the reactor for the planes, they still have to carry fuel for the actual point three point three million gallons is what they carry? That sure is. I mean think about that next time you go to the

Georgia Aquarium and you've got that one million gallon tank. Okay, number of telephones on board, we're getting into some of the funner stuff. Um, funner, more fun, the most fun, the most fun stuff. It's the bestest stuff that's coming up. Uh. The number of telephones on board twenty five hundred telephones. The number of televisions on board three thousand. What are they doing watching TV? They got a lot of They got a ship to run. You are occasionally allowed a

little downtime and amazing. Maybe I'm being harsh, I don't know. Anyways, you'd be quite the quartermaster. Thousands a thousand miles of electrical cable is on board when each one of these ships. Um, let's see, let's go down to some of the other stuff. Um, number of dentists on board five ye five dentists, So yeah, you gotta have that if you have thousands of people actually do have dental offices. They aboard, they carry enough food to feed six thousand people for seventy days. That's

a lot of that's that's eighteen thousand meals a day. Yes, that's right, because you're multiplied by three eighteen thousand meals and yeah, you're right, that's exactly right. So the amount of mail that's processes on board from you know, from the post office, one million pounds of mail goes to all these people throughout the throughout the year. Um, let's a number of medical doctors on board. This is actually surprisingly low six six considering yeah that you're that's like

one per thousand. That's that's a pretty low about just two more to wrap it up here. The number of haircuts that they that they give every week dred a week. But there's only one barber shop, so that that that dramatic. To be fair, come on, haircut aboard a navy vessel often or involves a pair of electric clippers and not much else. Yeah, that list wasn't as fun as I thought. It was no, no, no. But but another another one to think about is that you've got about people who

are part of the air wing aboard the vessel. Now the air wing that's all the people necessary for the flying and main main maintaining of aircraft. So it's not just the pilots, it's also the crew that that the flight cruise, the maintenance cruise, that sort of thing. Then you've got another three thousand who are the ship's company.

They're the ones who keep the ship running and have their own jobs aboard there, including people who are super secret, like the people who maintain the nuclear reactors, who even aboard ships end up being almost legendary because you don't necessarily know who it is who works on that duty. That it's not always something that is common knowledge aboard ship.

There's a there's an amazing and truly amazing ten hour documentary series that PBS did called Carrier, where they follow a bunch of sailors aboard the U s S. Nimits, the the lead ship of the Nimitz class aircraft carrier, and they talk about their roles aboard the ship, their decisions of going into the Navy, what it's like living aboard this kind of thing. It follows a deployment during the wars in Afghanistan, and so it actually follows these

people for a really long time and it's fascinating. And one of the things they talked about is how, Yeah, I don't think I've ever met anyone who works in the nuclear reactor area, or if they do, they don't. Yeah, they don't say, which is kind of interesting. I like that. I like that that secretive element to the Yeah. So it's it's really again, it's it's a very specific kind of world. And the the crew quarters I had referred

to the beds are referred to as racks. You have a rack of you know, and the racks are tiny. I mean, I don't know if you've seen pictures or video of it, but they there's barely enough space for you to climb in to get into your little bed. And they are stacked three to uh to a section, so you've got a lower bunk of mettal bunk in

an upper bunk. All of these are, like I said, there's just enough clearance for you to climb in essentially, um And in fact, I watched you have a guy getting in one for the first time, and he's like, I'm sure I'm going to get better at this, and this was the top one he did. He have a bunch of like bruises on his forehead. Yeah, I had

a couple of lumps, you know here there. Uh, And you have like a tiny locker and maybe a foot locker to keep your belongings in otherwise, you know, and you're just sharing this tiny space, and it might be a lot of people sharing a relatively small amount of living space, including a lot of people sharing one bathroom.

I mean, it's well, it's no cruise ship. And you know, even even if you do go on a cruise ship, oftentimes you'll you'll get into your room and your realize, like, this is a pretty small room, but you've got it pretty plush compared to the military. It's luxury compared to the military. So yeah, really really an amazing piece of technology.

Now I'm gonna go through a little bit more about the the various aircraft classes that exist, the types of aircraft carriers that have existed in the United States history, and then I think we can conclude by talking a little that about the the Forward class of super carrier that is soon to be part of the United States Navy and how it has a couple of interesting, interesting new technological improvements. UM. That might surprise you because it's

not it's not necessarily it's not that it's bigger. It's not that it's not bigger than the nimits really um. And it's not that it's necessarily faster or that it's able to carry a significantly larger UH component of aircraft. It's more about how it's more efficient and it needs fewer people aboard it, which is kind of cool. So, going back to the earliest days, the first aircraft carrier that the United States had was referred to as a Langley class aircraft carrier. It was the U S. S. Langley.

If you hear something class, that means that the name of the class is generally the name of the lead ship of that class, and then other ships in that class were built as using the first one as a reference point, like that's the model, and then all the other ships are going to be built based on that, largely because manufacturing processes at this stage mean that we can actually make copies of stuff. So there might be a dozen Langley class ships out there. There could there

could have been Yeah, yeah, I understand. But then but the first one was named the Langley, Yes, got it. So in this case it's a single ship class, meaning that there was only one ever made is a bad example in my part, but but only because we're talking about the very first one. Um it was. It was a commission in nineteen twenty two as an aircraft carrier. However, that's not how the Langley got got her start. And

of course we refer to ships as ladies. So she had a previous life as a collier, which is a type of bulk cargo ship. So she was converted from cargo ship to aircraft carrier. She was originally launched as a cargo ship in nineteen thirteen. No boy, she the conversion process began in nineteen twenty lasted two years. She was recommissioned in nineteen twenty two, and she on a wooden deck, right, yeah, she was she She did not have all the amenities of a modern aircraft carriers. She

was slow. She was only capable of traveling at fourteen knots, which is less than half of what we're talking about with the super carriers these days. That's a it's a huge problem if you're only going fourteen knots because you are not able to generate that amount of air speed that airplanes would really need to take off. So it was not not This is one of the reasons why the Langley is the only one in her class. Um

or was the only one, I should say. Now, there was a captain in the Navy who ended up taking control of the Langley. Uh He was given her command and ended up establishing a lot of the handling procedures that became standard operating procedure on aircraft carriers after that. His name was Captain Joseph Reeves. He would eventually rise to the rank of admiral. Uh So, a lot of the things that ended up being used every day on aircraft carriers were that they were established because Reeves put

those practices into as policy. He said, this is the way we're going to do things. Um Now, The Langley was damaged by Japanese dive bombers in nineteen forty two, and the surrounding US ships were forced to scuttle the Langley, so she was sunk by by US forces on purpose. Next, we have the Lexington class, named after the USS Lexington that was commissioned in ninety seven. Uh. It was originally

a battle cruiser, not an aircraft carrier. So the first two were not necessarily they didn't start out life as an aircraft exactly. Uh. And there were two ships in the Lexington class, so really the first three aircraft carriers started as something else. Now here's the interesting thing about why we converted. We being the United States, converted a battle cruiser into an aircraft carrier. So you may have heard of things like a disarmament treaties. This is not

a new concept. This does not just refer to the nuclear age. It goes back further back in the old days, like the nineteen twenties. The big weapons were these giant navy ships, and so there was a treaty signed, the Washington Naval Treaty of nineteen twenty two, which placed strict limitations on how many warships a nation would be allowed by international law to have. If the United States built to battle cruisers are actually, I'm sorry, battleships, they weren't

even they weren't battle cruisers. No, they were battle cruisers. So they built two battle cruisers, they would go over their limit. However, aircraft carriers at the time were not considered really warships. They were considered support. So instead of building battle cruiser, they just took the bones of the battle cruisers and converted them into aircraft carriers. Yeah. So this was still in the construction phase. It wasn't like they they had them out and sailing and then converted them.

It was all all from the uh at the shipyards. Uh. The lead ship of the class, the Lexington, was sunk in nineteen forty two during the Battle of the Coral Sea that Scott mentioned. The other was the Saratoga, which made it through World War Two. She was heavily damaged in a couple of different battles, but she made it through, and she was later sunk on purpose during a test

of nuclear weapons. Yeah. Yeah, this is interesting. Huh. Yeah, it's when you start, you decide, Hey, we're just gonna we're gonna park this here boat right off the bikini and then we're gonna blow it up. Yeah, but you know what, how else are you going to test that? How else are you going to figure out how that ship is going to stand up to an attack like that? As it turns out, it doesn't, but it certainly proved it in that case. Yeah, so very interesting fate for

those two. Then you have the Ranger class, another single ship class of ships. So in other words, it's almost funny to call it a class when there's only one, but that's what we do. So she was the commission in nineteen thirty four and deep commission in ninety s. And this is the first ship that was built to be an aircraft carrier. Um. She was only seven thirty

feet long or two two point five meters. I say only because that's much shorter than today's super carriers, had a full crew complement of two thousand, four hundred sixty one people. And uh, she was in the Atlantic Ocean during World War Two because she was too slow to be deemed useful for the Pacific theater. And now you said seven thirty ft but that was probably sufficient for prop aircraft. Oh yeah, yeah. And and again she was built specifically with aircraft carrier in mind, so this was

not a conversion. So she was, you know, designed with those those elements in mind. At that point, all we're still talking about kind of the straight uh landing takeoff strip that caused so many problems early on. Next we have the York Town class, which was commissioned in nineteen thirty seven. There were three ships built in this class. Of course, the lead ship is the York Town Um. She was sunk in nineteen forty two at the Battle of Midway, So when we talk about Midway classes, guess

what that's named after. Anyway. The Hornet was another York Town class ship. She was sunk also in nineteen forty two at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. The third ship was the original U S S Enterprise, the original well original in the sense of aircraft carriers. Um. Now you know what, I don't think until this morning when you were talking about I don't think I knew that there were two USS Enterprises. Yeah, yeah, so this one is This one was a York Town class ship.

There would later be an Enterprise class ship also known as the USS Enterprise. So if you guys have been watching a lot of Star Trek and you get confused about which enterprises which, because there's Enterprise you know, a B, C, D, and then of course there's the previous ones. Uh that dates back all the way to the Navy days, I mean, and of course they named the Enterprise after this particular ship. This was the most decorated ship in US Navy history.

It's on the bottom of the ocean. Well you can't, you know, and no one lives forever going through this list. I mean, man, there's a bunch of them down there. Oh yeah, yeah, Well she she actually was. She made it through. She was not sunk the way the York Town and the Hornet were. That's something. She was seven seventy feet long or two ys and had a complement of two thousand, two hundred seventeen crew. Next we get to the Wasp class. It's another single ship class. Only

one ever made. Uh. She was commissioned in nineteen forty but sunk in nineteen forty two during the Guadalcanal Campaign, aim by a Japanese submarine. She was si eight ft long or two or ten and she carried a crew of two thousand, one hundred sixty seven during wartime or around eighteen hundred during peacetime. Now, her construction came down to politics. This was one of the things I thought was fascinating. So you remember that treaty image. In the treaty,

it limited the amount of tonnage. The United States was able to dedicate two aircraft carriers, but they had fifteen thousand ton tonnage left over after everything else, and they said, well, we don't want that to go to waste. Let's build an aircraft carrier that will make up this tonnage that we have been allotted. And the Wasp was that ship. That's strange because okay, you're talking, you're talking about a fifteen thousand ton aircraft carrier, yeah, compared to like the

thirty thousand plus sixty thousand Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean it's it seems like it's so small, and how it's got a wasp that yeah, yeah, and she only lasted two years before she was sunk. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. You know, I've talked a lot on the show about smart homes, and you know, in the old days, it was really hard to set up a smart home. But what if you could set one up and control it all from your smart phone.

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smart things dot com slash tech. Now, now we get into one of the like what was the backbone in the United States Navy during World War Two. That's the Essex class of aircraft carriers, commission in nineteen forty two. There was also an extended bowl variation. The bow is the front end of the ship. There was an extended bow variation that was commissioned in nineteen four. There were

twenty four ships built in the Essex class. There were another eight that had been planned but were canceled before they could be built. Uh So this was the most plentiful of them. Out of those twenty four, fourteens saw combat during World War Two. Not a single one was sunk. That's impressive. So all of them made it through World War two. Uh. They range because there's an extended vol version.

They range from about a hundred twenty feet, which is almost two to eight feet, which is about two D seventy. You know, that kind of makes sense though, because we were talking about the role reversal and how you know that became the primary player. Then the aircraft carrier was during World War Two, so they when they went out, you know, these fourteen ships that went out and saw it, saw action. They were surrounded by support ships and they

were protecting them fiercely. That's probably the difference. That's probably why all four teen made it through that. I mean, clearly the biggest danger you you face there. I mean, there are plenty of dangerous lots of them, but the biggest one would be submarines because those would be the

hardest to detect. Now, a lot of the aircraft carriers, in fact, all aircraft carriers to my knowledge, have anti submarine um UH strategies where they deploy what is essentially a decoy that makes a lot of noise, so a submarine ends up focusing on that. Torpedoes go towards that as opposed to going to the actual aircraft carrier, so you don't want to make a lot of noise. Then you have independence class commission in this was another conversion.

These were light aircraft carriers. They were conversions of Cleveland class light cruisers. So if you look at the list of Independence class ships, you'll see that they have multiple names because they had already had a life as a light cruiser, but now had been converted into aircraft carrier, and they got named a new name in that case. Yeah, that's weird because sailors generally think that it's bad luck to rename a ship points called it something. But I

guess that was technically a different ship by then. Anyway, cruisers are small to medium sized warships. They usually act as fleet support and World War Two, you the United States had need of a lot more aircraft carriers, but they are expensive they take a lot of time to make, so there weren't a whole lot of options. The best option was to convert stuff that they already had into

aircraft carriers rather than have to build new ones. Makes sense, Yeah, it makes sense, um, So nine ships were converted ultimately in this way. Now, next we have the Midway class, which was commissioned in nine There were three of these. They were longer than the Essex class. The leadership of the class. The Midway remained in service until nineteen two to nine two not a bad not a bad return

on investment is a surprisingly long run. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the aircraft that the United States has depended upon, some of those aircraft have been in service for a really long time. But this is this is truly, you know, impressive to me. And they might have changed a little bit between ninety probably got a couple of refits where they changed changed up, you know where Hey, you finally got the compass to stop wobbling. Um. Yeah, So the last action that the Midway saw was an

Operation Desert Storm. She took took part in that, and then, uh, she is now a museum in San Diego, California, which is where I got to with several of these. Yeah, a lot of these aircraft carriers are a lot and I'm not mentioning all of them by name, because obviously that would We're gonna be running super long if I did that. But a lot of them are now museums in various locations. Some of them are in the process of being converted into museums for some places. Um, it's

a great use for them. Yeah, it's really it's fascinating to really get an actual look at what the living conditions are like. To see these racks and see how tiny those bunks are, and just think, like anyone who hasn't served time on board a ship, uh you know, I had had had any service aboard a ship like that. It really kind of gives you a new appreciation for the sacrifice that the men and women who choose to

do that. You know what they go through, no doubt. Um. Next, we've got the Saipan class, which was commissioned in nineteen forty six. There were only two ships built in that class. They were shorter four point six ft long two eight meters or so, and they carried a complement of seventeen hundred. They were designed to carry forty two aircraft, including twelve bombers.

They had a relatively short service life because, uh well they just weren't as useful once we started getting the development of the jet engine planes right, they were far too short for that. So they were converted into command and communication ships in the nineteen fifties. Um, so that meant that we needed to have a new class of ship designed specifically to accommodate jet fighters. And here we

arrive it's like the modern era. Yeah, this is where we're making that that you know, we're still not quite the nuclear era, but we're at the super carrier era. This is where we arrive at the aircraft carrier that wasn't the big one that that started but wasn't completed, the United States class the USS United States didn't. They only work on the beginning production of this thing for just a few days before it was canceled. They had laid the keel down. Depending upon the the account you read,

it's between five and nine days. Like the keel was laid out, and within within a week or so it was canceled. And uh, it was supposed to be a ship that would be one thousand ninety ft long or so. This would have been the longest aircraft carrier up to that point. Um she was supposed to be able to carry twelve to eighteen heavy bombers and fifty four jet fighters.

Now she was canceled by order of the Secretary of Defense, Lewis A. Johnson, who sided with the Air Force in an argument that was going on between the Air Force and the Navy. The Air Force said, listen, we're in the nuclear age, and the best investment is for us to build lots and lots of long range bombers that can fly out over a target drop a nuclear weapon. This is going to be to terrence, will never have a war again. And Johnson said, this is the way I want to go, and it led to what was

called the Revolt of the Admirals. So you had these admirals in the Navy who all said, no, aircraft carriers are going to still be important. We're going to need a place that we can, uh we can maneuver into different parts of the world and use as a base of operations for our our air strategy. Yeah. So you had the Navy arguing that we still needed to have aircraft carriers and the Air Force arguing that no, we

did not. Then a little conflict broke out, the Korean War, and the Korean War illustrated the nuclear deterrence would not work in every kind of outbreak of violence, and the United States believed that it had a real stake in the outcome of the Korean War. Uh A, fear of the spread of communism was a large part of this. It was all happening as the Cold War is raging, and the Navy said, see, we need aircraft carriers, and

so back to building aircraft carriers. The Navy went now something, I mean the research and development I don't know how long that took before, you know, prior to to the start of the build, but to get nine or ten days or five days or whatever into the build and then just decided to quit, that's remarkable. Yeah, yeah, exactly what waste. Yeah, I mean, it's we're talking like a hundred million dollars at that point. Then we get the

Forestal class. This is the one that had the famous fire, the USS forest All that was commissioned in nineteen fifty five. There were four of them built um and it was the first sexual aircraft carriers to be designated as super carriers. All four were decommissioned in the nineteen nineties and they were one thousand seventy ft long, about three and they still used steam turbines for propulsion like they steam boilers. They didn't have nuclear reactors yet. The crew compliment for

that was four thousand three. So we're getting bigger. Someone down there shoveling colon Yeah, a lot of them. Actually, Yeah, you know, throw another log on the fire. We need to go a little faster what they're doing. More steam, more steam, next, we had the Kittie Hawk class now Kitty Hawk obviously named after the test flights that the Wright brothers did at Kitty Hawk. UH. That was commission in nineteen sixty one. There were three ships built in

that class, the Kittie Hawk, the Constellation, and the America. UH. And they also used steam turbines. Then we get to the Enterprise class and the next USS Enterprise commissioned on November nineteen six and UH, the USS Enterprise is the only ship in this class there they've never built any other ones. UH. It was one thousand, one hundred one ft long or one thousand hundred feet two inches long three hundred thirty five point six four um. Its flight deck was two d fifty two ft wide or seventy

five point six meters. It displaced eighty nine thousand, six hundred tons with a full load. Top speed was more than thirty knots. Had more than three thousand, three hundred fifty members of the ship's company and another two thousand, four hundred eighty as the air wing crew. They had a total of five thousand, eight hundred thirty people aboard this thing. That's crew, huge crew. UH. It's armament included anti ship missile defense systems and anti aircraft weapons, and

it could hold more than sixty aircraft. Uh. And it's to be decommissioned this year this year, so this is one that is probably going to end up being a museum someplace, I would hope. So, yeah, and I hope that they hang up pictures from Star Trek everywhere. Next, we have the Kennedy class. Uh. This is a subclass of the Kittie Hawk class of aircraft carriers. It was commissioned in There's only one of them, or there was only one of them, the John F. Kennedy, and it

was decommissioned in two thousand seven. Not quite as long as the Enterprise class, but they had a similar propulsion system, which means, you know, the Enterprise being one that was the first one to have nuclear reactors for propulsion. The Kennedy class also had it, so unlike the Kittie Hawk class, this is why it's a subclass, right, it didn't have the steam boilers like Kitty Hawk did. It had nuclear reactors,

so that's why it's considered a subclass. Unto itself, it could carry more than eighty aircraft, but it was decommissioned because it was also the most expensive ship to maintain in the fleet, and it was due for a major overhaul, and budget cuts said that that was gonna happen, so they decommissioned it. Yeah, So instead they built the Nimitz class, and this is what we're using today, the largest warship

on the seas right now. It's named after World War Two Pacific Lee Commander Chester W. Nimitz, and the Nimitz class was commissioned on May third, nineteen seventy, just a short time before I was nineteen seventy five. And we've gone all the way through to two thousand and fifteen or sixteen really before we come to the next version of class Et class of super carrier, which is there for class Yeah, so she's been in this class of ships, has been in service for for more than four decades.

That's a long time. The Navy has ten Nimitz class aircraft carriers. They are one thousand, ninety two ft long, three thirty two point eight five and one aren't thirty four at the beam that's four meters. That's a that's at the bottom of the ship. So here's the thing. The other thing about aircraft carriers is they kind of had this thing where they're narrow at the bottom and they kind of flare out with wise at the top. And obviously you need to have a lot of surface

area for your flight deck. That's another element of them. You know, it's interesting. I mean we've got ten super carriers. That's pretty cool. Yeah, no, it is really cool. Um, the ship's company is between three thousand and thirty two hundred uh crew members plus fifteen hundred pilots and crew for the air wing, plus five hundred staff. So your total is between five thousand and five thousand, two hundred people per super carrier. So it's a lot of folks

on there. That is I mean, the logistics of of maintaining everything that you have to do. I mean we've i know we've talked about it, but even the mail service, the sewage system, uh, fresh food or fresh food and water, um, you know, all of this stuff. I mean, the barbershop, the dentist, the doctor is all that coordinating everything has just got to be an incredible undertake. Yeah, I mean that's that's why you have to have this huge number of staff aboard. I Mean you sit there and think

like what are they doing. While they're doing they're making sure everything runs smoothly. They have to. Yeah, I mean it's a military operation and everybody is there for a specific purpose. That's the other thing is that there's six thousand people on board, roughly six thousands that have a specific job that they're doing. It's not like a cruise ship where you go on and you know, more than half the people are there just to have a good time,

you know and relax. The other half are there to work. You're not gonna find a lot of people having a good time aboard and aircraft carrier. Well, yeah, maybe they are only I get a little little like basketball in or something occasionally. Yeah. Sure, But but the thing is they've all got a job, I mean, every single one of them. So it's it's it's just a different way

to look at things. Yeah, and um and you might you know, we haven't talked a lot about the defense systems aboard aircraft carriers, largely because their main their main weapon are the aircraft, right, but they do have various uh defense systems aboard them with the limits. You're talking about CE Sparrow missile system, which is an anti aircraft and anti missile weapon. It also has the Phalanx c I WS defense system to protect against anti ship missiles.

It's essentially an automated twenty millimeter gabbling gun that tracks and shoots down incoming missiles. Yeah, that's Watching videos of this thing working is terrifying. Also. Yeah, and also these serviced air missiles that use radar seeking UH signals to phone in on whatever they're bouncing the signals off of. So that is another cool thing to watch. I mean to watch the watch the missiles reaching their target based

on radar. And they also have a rolling airframe missile mounts which can launch surface to air missiles, which is another anti ship cruise missile defense system. So in other words, if an incoming missiles coming toward the aircraft carrier, you can launch one of these to try and UH and and destroy the missile before it hits. And then you already talked about the things that they call the nixies, right, Yeah,

that's the for the anti submarine. Yeah, what a cool idea that they deploy decoys behind the ship in order to draw in the torpedo file. Very cool. I think of it kind of like flak for aircraft, where you're trying to make sure by by by jettison, jettison ng uh, lots of stuff that a missile could mistake for the aircraft that you can escape without being being hit by the weapon. Clever. So now we're finally at what is coming up next. So the Nimitz class is the current

aircraft carrier the United States Navy depends upon. The next is the Ford class. As we mentioned, it's the same length more or is you know, essentially the same size as the Nimitz class, but it has a wider flight deck. Uh, it's four ft wider. It's got two or fifty six ft wide or seventy eight, and has two nuclear reactors to provide the propulsion power and electricity. Has same general top speed as the limits more or less. Again the Navy doesn't really want to show, UH. But the systems

aboard the Ford require fewer personnel. So the total crew of a Ford class ship, remember limits is five thousand to five thousand, two hundred Ford class four thousand, five thirty nine. How did they cut the crew down? It's it's incredible that they have streamlined system so that it requires fewer people to maintain and oversee. UH. And it can also hold more aircraft than the Nimits class vessel, more than seventy five of them. Similar armament to nmits um,

and it has some advance and aircraft launches. Uh and one particular that we need to mention. This is how we're going to conclude. We're gonna talk about the difference. So we had talked about the steam catapults earlier. Yeah, then the the Ford class is changing. We're finally getting away from these steam powered pistons that launch aircraft. They're switching to an electro magnetic aircraft launch system also known as EMLS. This idea, it's a really cool idea. I

gotta say that, you know. My first my initial thought of this was are they going to be able to shorten the decks? Are they're gonna be able to make smaller aircraft carriers? But but then I thought, well, they still need to store the Aircraft's still gonna need a massive ship. M It's not gonna get dramatically smaller. But they might be able to shorten the length of the takeoff area, or they might be able to provide more runways, more takeoff areas, because there's some that have as many

as they can launch three or four airplanes. Actually, you know what, the most I've ever seen launched at one time is three simultaneously. But yeah, you could have like four or five catapult areas. Yes, and the emaals ones can reset much faster than the steam ones. Within forty five seconds they can reset to be able to launch another aircraft. Now, it's probably gonna take longer than forty five seconds for you to get the next aircraft hooked up and ready to go, but that's how long the

system requires before it can launch again. So it's very fast. There's some downsides. I'll get to it in the second but the general way this works is that it works on the basic principles of magnetism, right where uh like, polls on the magnet repel and opposite poles attract. So remember that shuttle we talked about with the steam powered one,

same sort of thing. You've got a shuttle there, and you have a leading edge the front side of the shuttle, the part that the toebar is going to connect to, and then you have the back edge of the shuttle, and you've got these two rails that are on either side of the shuttle, just like the pistons would be on the steam powered one, but instead of using steam, you're using electricity to generate magnetic fields, and you are

pulling the shuttle in the front. You're creating an opposite charge, so it attracts the front of the shuttle as it starts to you know, it wants to move toward that opposite and it's going to slam into the other end. And then you use the same charge on the back to push the shells, So you're pulling and pushing it at the same time. And by changing by fluctuating this magnetic field at a particular speed down the length of these rails, you propel the shuttle very very quickly down

the rails. Now, the power of that push is dependent on a couple of different things. The length of the rails, which in this case are about three feet in length, and the amount of current you're putting through. It means you've gotta put a lot of current. We're talking about a lot of electricity, a huge amount. We're talking one hundred million watts per launch, which you sound like dr e one hundred million what's doing the pinky thing? Just

in case you guys can't see. Also, that's the same amount of electricity a small town would use in that same amount of time. So every time your launch you're using within that forty five seconds of of launch and recovery, you're using essentially the same amount of electricity a town would use in that Yeah, who cares, because you've got a nuclear reactor, your create in it yourself. You're using what you create. It's not like you're you're taking it

from somebody else to use it. Yeah, they don't have an extension cord leading all or I don't mean to trivialize it right now what I mean, but I mean it's interesting and I wonder how many Okay, I wonder what safety aspects this brings out? Our safety concerns This brings up for crew members working on the deck well, because there's a lot of crew members that each have their own job and they're you know, they got their head down doing what they're supposed to be doing. There's

gonna be brand new procedures for this, no doubt. Sure. Yeah, it's it requires a smaller crew than the steam powered version does. But obviously that crew does need to be alert because if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, I mean, when those jet engines. Uh, fire up. I read. I read a story about a guy aboard an aircraft carrier who got sucked into the intake, but did not get sucked into the actual jet engine itself.

He suffered injuries, but they were not not critical injuries because he didn't get pulled all the way into the engine. He was just stuck in a terribly uncomfortable position right at the very entrance of it. But that's a real concern, you know, And that's going to be a concern whether it's a steam powered one or electromagnetic because because again, the pilot is still going to have to power up full throttle so that they can take off properly. Okay,

I was getting. I was getting more to the point of, you know, somebody whose job it is to to hook up the shuttle to the to the landing gear, and if they mistakenly touch you know, I don't touch the metal on the plane and the metal on the on the deck here at the same time. Um I can I understand. But there's also there's also huge dangers with the steam powered Yeah. Well, I mean you're talking about a massive amount of steam under huge pressure. Something's going

to throw a plane off of a ship. I mean, it's gonna be it's gonna be dangerous no matter what. Right, So this has been one of those things that some people have claimed has held up the development of the Ford Supercarrier because obviously, like we're saying, you need to make sure the system is going to work, it's going to replace something that already exists. So there's some who would argue, well, why are you replacing something that has been proven to work, And the answer is that, well,

this system could potentially take up much less space. You still have to have a massive mouth space just for the power generator to send the electricity to the rails, but it's still going to be smaller than the steam uh pistons that you would be using at least directly under the deck um and uh you know, it uses again a smaller cruise so you don't need to have as many people a border aircraft carrier. Military is gonna like that. Yeah, so uh, you know, not the most

electrically uh the efficient device maybe, but still really fascinating. Yeah, maybe I should clarify that military budget people are gonna but the but the thing is, I still wonder I wonder if it's going to be any faster than the steam system, or if it's going to be more capable

than the steam system. As far as you know, the launch distance, the launch time, because we said that it launches a plane in like in two seconds and it's going a hundred and sixty five when it at the end of that of that travel, well, I mean it is the difference between changing the electric current along the rail versus the mechanical action of a piston being pushed forward. So I guess you're going you're going on and instantly, Yeah,

and then your acceleration could be even faster. I would imagine, I mean I I also imagined that, they said it. So it's not that because obviously we don't want to cause injury to the pilot or damage the vehicle. But yeah, a that that sort of speed. So uh, this was really a lot of fun to talk about. And um, you know, when we first started, I wasn't sure if we were going to get two episodes out of it, but we sure did. Yeah, yeah, we did, I can

tell already. So here here's another peak behind the curtain for you new listeners out there. Sometimes we don't know how long an episode is going to be and we don't know how um you know, you know whether or not something's gonna be one part or two parts. And the funny thing is you've already listened to part one and this is the end of part two. But we didn't know what was going to be in the part two until I looked down at Scott's timing device and saw that we're well over an hour and a half.

If we wanted to release this as one episode, you were giving them all the secrets, I know, right well, I mean, come on, we just had tech Stuff seven episode, so I feel like I feel like we've had a few moments, me and the listeners probably, so Scott, thank you so much for joining me for these two episodes. Are really appreciated, you know it. Once again, I had

a lot of fun talking about this. You know way more about aircraft carriers than I do, obviously, but I had a great time and it's always a good conversation. So thank you for inviting me, and I'd gladly do it again. Fantastic And next time, I swear I'll pick something car related. Now, maybe next time we'll talk about the Coast to coast driverless car test that's about to happen.

We're recording this the week just before that weekend where that's gonna start, and there's gonna be a coast to coast test of a an Audi vehicle from San Francisco to New York. So maybe we'll after that's over, whether it succeeds or fails, you and I can sit down and talk about what happens. Let's see what happens. That sounds good, well, guys. If you want to hear more of Scott's work, you need to go check out Car Stuff.

It's a great series, the fantastic You've got the Car Stuff website that has the videos as well as the podcasts on it. Need to go check that out. Scott again, thank you so much, listeners. If you have suggestions for future topics you want to have me cover on tech Stuff, send me a message and let me know. I'm tired of guessing. Guys are tough. My email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a

line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The handle at all three is tech Stuff hs W and we'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics works dot com Change