Originally Posted by
Jimlad1
The USN is actually very interested in CVF - its a significantly more revolutionary design than the FORD, which is more of an evolution of a design from over 40yrs ago and is very manpower intensive.
The US carriers also do not routinely operate with as many aircraft as perhaps thought - they tried it with 90 plus in the early cold war and quickly stopped due to the difficulties on storage on deck. Its highly unusual to see much more than 48 F18s these days on a carrier, and a 50-60 wing is the usual standard.
CVF is designed to carry 36 JSF plus helos, based as I understand it on hangar stowage only and in reality if a deck park is used could easily go above 50 aircraft, much like her US cousins. If you based US CVN capacity on hangar parking alone, then it would be akin to a CVF as only a proportion of the airwing fits in the hangar.
The final reason why CVF is the length she is, is that a US CVN is physically too big to enter UK harbours.
A little clarification if I may.
Ford
is a new design from keel up, including new reactor designs, new launch and recovery systems new flightdeck design and some other goodies. Some of the aviation thinking also went into QEC. BUT - when you have a pretty good template to start with, it's not going to look radically different. There was no equivalent template for QEC - although the RCNC tried (bless them) to build on CVS, it was never going to deliver any significant uplift in sortie rate or deck park. For that, you need more flightdeck width which means sponsons and d/e lifts, which incidentally means more freeboard twixt hangar deck (or more precisely the underside of the lift) and the deep waterline. Nor could it be based on Eagle/Ark IV.
The level of manpower applied in US CVN tends to reflect their different enlistment model, plus the fact that they are not (yet) as sensitive to manpower costs as the RN. They have tried to reduce manning, but are perhaps less willing to compromise on certain things than the RN.
The USN CVW numbers tend to reflect the reduction in tacair buys (both quantity and type) rather than any innate desire to free up deck space. The ships that did EastLant / Med deployments in the early 90s tended to have the full 80+ CVW. After that, when types (A6, F14, S3) started to retire without replacement the decks got significantly less crowded. Not really through space, but simply lack of cabs. CVW3 on Trumans visit to Portsmouth in 05(?) had five squadrons of F14/F18 aboard, plus S3, E2, EA6 and SH60 and the CoD. But it was the last F14 cruise and she was off to OIF. It's noticeable that the "gap" tends to be those aircraft that either the A12 or CSA programmes were supposed to deliver. Spot factor is an issue, but then the SuperBug is smaller than the Tomcat, even if the Classic Bug is bigger than the A7.
QEC has always had a deck park to accommodate the planned TAG/CAG. There were always those citing NorthLant weather and RN precedent, but the size of hangar required to make that work was prohibitive. Besides which, you can't operate with low handler manning if you're constantly shifting cabs up and down. If memory serves, the variants back in the very early days for CVSG(R) were 15/20 (hangared/total), 20/26 and 26/40 - which is where we ended up.