Personal Aircraft Carrier

Well ... the big turbo diesels and surface drives get the boat up on foils to minimize the take off run ... and the SS aircraft is a seaplane to make recovery easier ...

Sounds as practical as some of the other ideas that have been posted ...

Back on topic ... what's the stall speed of a J-3 Cub? 35 MPH? I remember someone landed one on a "flight deck" that was a plywood platform on top of a truck. The 100' private carrier is doable.

 

how big of an airplane needs to take off from it?

We could be talking very large.

 

I remember someone landed one on a "flight deck" that was a plywood platform on top of a truck. The 100' private carrier is doable.

IF the carrier is really fast , 75 or so there is no end of aircraft that can be visualized landing.

A mostly empty 727 is light enough to still fly ,and could spot land, but might need catapult assistance taking off with a load.

FAST FRED

 

Just to go off track a wee bit I always thought one of the ideas of having a boat was to AVOID airplane trips! Unless of course you have a fleet somewhere of people you don't particularly like and want to do something nasty to them -like teach em to swim!

 

a 727 is very large it needs of a mile of runway to take off (over 5,000ft) I think we are talking much smaller.

 

No aircraft the size and weight of a Boeing 727 has ever left the fight deck of any aircraft carrier. The largest and heaviest ever was the North American A-5 Vigilante, which was retired back in the seventies. There is one mounted as the 'gate guard' at my local airport:

http://www.taxi-sfb.com/Pages/R5A Vigilante.htm

That plane is not small, but a 727 is roughly twice the size and weight and suggesting anything like this for a personal AC carrier is perhaps about as feasible as building a solo transatlantic racer from only popsicle sticks.

IMHO

Jimbo

 

C-130

The Navy experimented with landing C-130's on carriers and used RATO for takeoff assist

 

Yeah and Ling-Temco-Vought landed that crazy tilt-wing with the four Allison 501's which is also about the same size and weight as a Herc. But these are still about 8-12 TONS short of a 727's weight (depending on the model). Another problem with the 727 is it only has single tire main gears; they are reputed to be the heaviest loaded singe tires in aviation. This means the deck will have to be thicker to accomodate this plane than virtually any other. The main wheels may each support the entire weight of the aircraft momentarily. Max weight of a 727 is about 180,000 lbs for the -200's and about 150,000 for the short ones. The Herc is about 135,000, IIRC.

For comparison the A-5 flew off the deck at just over 100,000 lbs when carrying the free-fall nuke with full fuel. This was a 'special' weight, not the usual allowed take-off weight for this airplane.

Jimbo

 

greenseas I think you are talking about J.A.T.O, Jet Assisted Take-Off

RATO means nothing as far as I am concerned.

 

Something else - depends on the ability of your pilots - back in the sixties a bunch of Americans landed on one of the largest Brit' Carriers of the time (Victorious) to a man they refused to take off again, 'ship was too small' was the comment (God how we enjoyed that!!!). Goes to illustrate that if your not used to landing and taking off from postage stamps your going to have more difficulty than a full trained 'carrier pilot!

 

I guess they were used to using the larger american carriers eh?

 

About that! Large and loud! Ain't changed much, still the same!

 

RATO from wikipedia:
A system for assisted take off known as JATO for 'Jet-assisted take off' (and the similar RATO, 'Rocket-assisted take off') was popular during the 1950s, when heavy bombers started to require two or more miles of runways to take off fully laden.

Yeah 727 banging on the deck seems rather challenging from engineering standpoint.

I think that Fast Fred was more suggesting that if you can run the boat fast the plane can land at decent air speed though landing gear to deck speed difference would no be that much.

 

I would think that it would be cheaper to make the boat bigger than faster.

getting a 100' boat to do 30knots is very expensive and I think the gains would be min. compared to just making a 200' boat do 12 knots.

Aircraft carriers are fast but they don't have to be. Enterprise launches and lands F-18's from a dead stop. I am pretty sure that that is a requirement as what would happen if the planes were up and the ship got stuck or engines broke down no-where near an airport.


I would think an arresting wire type system might work for what we are talking about. For a pretty slow prop plane the mods should be pretty small.

 

The trick, if you want to run fixed wing aircraft off a boat, is to have the plane take off and land at really low speeds- and in really short distances.

Compared to most fighters of its era, the F-18 (like other carrier fighters) has a pretty quick takeoff run and can be airborne at fairly low speeds for a plane of that type. (Ever seen the flaps fully deployed on that thing? They're HUGE.)

Plus the Navy carrier has a nice little steam catapult that gives the plane a heckuva lot more momentum than the engines could in the same distance. That's not a particularly pleasant system to implement or use, but it's the only way to get such a heavy, fast plane off a boat without a rocket.

As for the arresting wire system, yes it does work, the trouble is getting an airframe to handle it. Those things put an insane amount of stress on the airframe and putting one on a Cessna 172 might even rip the tail right off the plane if you come down a bit too quick. Beefing up the airframe to take it adds weight, which means you have to carry more gas to get the same range, and also fly faster to get airborne, but you accelerate slower under engine, so you need a catapult.

No, I think for the P.A.C. what we'd want is a lightweight, powerful S/VTOL plane with a huge wing and good high-lift gadgets.

Sketches coming as soon as I'm done counting cosmic-ray muons.....