I have yet to see any footage of those aircraft taking off with anything like a half decent payload but by crikey they do have a very envious power to weight ratio.
Looking at the footage in the above posts it looks to me like one aircraft is taking off with the brakes still fully on!! It has certainly left behind a large amount of rubber.
I dread to think of the additional costing to try and upgrade the Typhoon for carrier operation. My home from home was directly underneath the flight deck and all recoveries were more like controlled 'crashes'. The under carriage has to be constructed from good old fashioned Welsh cast iron!!
Anything less will not stand the stresses involved in this environment.
Originally Posted by My Resident Boffin
Because it's a very space-inefficient way of operating a deck. Both launch and recovery modes require most of the deck to be clear, hence very little room for spotting a/c. Kuznetsov is bigger than QEC, yet has less sortie generation potential.
Look at how much space is taken up for the launching of heavier aircraft. The big trucks they use as crash tenders take up all the space frrd of the island and I guess there will be room for a few parked aircraft aft of that structure but then you are down to getting aircraft out of the hangar lifts that can NEVER be obstructed!! Not a good procedure by any stretch of my vivid imagination.
