Aircraft carrier | Definition, History, & Facts (2024)

aircraft carrier, naval vessel from which airplanes may take off and on which they may land. As early as November 1910, an American civilian pilot, Eugene Ely, flew a plane off a specially built platform on the deck of the U.S. cruiser Birmingham at Hampton Roads, Virginia. On January 18, 1911, in San Francisco Bay, Ely landed on a platform built on the quarterdeck of the battleship Pennsylvania, using wires attached to sandbags on the platform as arresting gear; he then took off from the same ship.

The British navy also experimented with the carrier; during World War I it developed the first true carrier with an unobstructed flight deck, the HMS Argus, built on a converted merchant-ship hull. The war ended before the Argus could be put into action, but the U.S. and Japanese navies quickly followed the British example. The first U.S. carrier, a converted collier renamed the USS Langley, joined the fleet in March 1922. A Japanese carrier, the Hosyo, which entered service in December 1922, was the first carrier designed as such from the keel up.

Fundamentally, the carrier is an airfield at sea with many special features necessitated by limitations in size and the medium in which it operates. To facilitate short takeoffs and landings, airspeeds over the deck are increased by turning the ship into the wind. Catapults flush with the flight deck assist in launching aircraft; for landing, aircraft are fitted with retractable hooks that engage transverse wires on the deck, braking them to a quick stop.

The control centres of a carrier are situated in the superstructure (the “island”), at one side of the flight deck. Aircraft landings are guided by radio and radar and by visual signals from the deck.

Carriers were first used in combat during the early stages of World War II. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by carrier-based planes on December 7, 1941, dramatically demonstrated the potential of the aircraft carrier, which thereafter was the dominant combat vessel of the war. The carrier played leading roles in the sea battles of the Pacific theatre, such as Midway Island, Coral Sea, and Leyte Gulf.

Carriers built after the war were larger and had armoured flight decks. Jet aircraft posed serious problems because of their greater weight, slower acceleration, higher landing speeds, and greater fuel consumption. Three British innovations contributed toward solution of these problems: a steam-powered catapult, an angled, or canted, flight deck, and a mirror landing-signal system.

On September 24, 1960, the first nuclear-powered carrier, the Enterprise, was launched by the United States. It had no need for the fuel bunkers, smokestacks, and ducts for the elimination of exhaust gases that had occupied space in previous carriers.

Subsequent design modifications produced such variations as the light carrier, equipped with large amounts of electronic gear for the detection of submarines, and the helicopter carrier, intended for conducting amphibious assault. Another development was the substitution of missile armament for much of the former antiaircraft firepower. Carriers with combined capabilities are classified as multipurpose carriers.