Stats
Fod,
I don't doubt those figures, they're probably about right. The point I was making was that we just didn't see a step-change in availability, response times, endurance and range as many carrier obsessives often claim you will get from carrier-based air. 120 out of 138 days is still a 15% unavailability rate - I'd be concerned about an airfield that had that bad a weather factor in the Med in summer. Also, not all of those days were launching OUP sorties, and the carrier didn't provide 24hr ops.
For me, carriers give you influence in a way you may not always be able to get with a transitory air presence, but to suggest that you can run a proper air campaign from them is disingenuous - even if you could fit enough jets on them, you don't bring the enablers. You need proper tankers to give your jets suitable endurance after getting airborne from the deck with a decent warload, and you need big aircraft to give you ISTAR and airborne C2 - and no, JSF and some sort of ASACS-type Merlin won't give you the full suite of capabilities we were employing against the Jamahariya forces.
So, returning to the subject of the thread - and paraphrasing my earlier posts - would it have made any difference to this particular campaign if we'd still have had embarked Harrier? From one who was there, the answer is an emphatic no - and if we'd kept it at the expense of the Tornado force, the NATO campaign would probably have suffered a bit, and UK influence in NATO would have suffered a lot. Sorry, but there it is.
BTW, I can probably make a long list of all the airfields that remained operational during WW2 but I don't think that would prove anything would it?