“...
The Airfield and the Aircraft Carrier Compared...
...Aircraft carriers have to contain all these facilities onboard, and so it is often assumed that they are enormous objects. Indeed, the term ‘floating airfield’ is often used to describe them, and this is understandable. With their apparently huge flight decks, towering structures and complex fittings and equipment sprouting from their sides, they can resemble the vast ‘starships’ of science fiction. Most people, if asked to compare an aircraft carrier with an airfield, would say that they are about the same size. However, this is not the case....
...The airfield completely and massively dwarfs the ship. The aircraft carrier would fit comfortably on to one of the aircraft parking areas. And yet this ship is capable of taking and operating around 70 aircraft. Nearly twice as many aircraft are based in a fraction of the space along with fuel, weapons, people, hangars, workshops and communications systems and are still operated effectively and safely. Clearly, simply ‘downsizing’ or compressing land-based operations cannot do this. The solution is a totally different way of operating very different combat aircraft – and
these differences, which lead to a totally different ‘ethos’, lie at the heart of naval aviation.
The key difference is the depth of integration between the aircraft and its base. An airfield is an essentially passive supporter of the aircraft – stores, fuel and weapons are delivered to various separated areas to support missions, and the very long runways offer no more than a hard smooth surface to run along on. On board a carrier, the operation of aircraft has to be actively merged with the operation of the ship and its specialist systems, with the result that the aircraft completely depend on the ship to deliver combat capability. This is the central feature of naval aviation, and it leads to a different ‘world’, in which most of the basic tenets and assumptions of land based operation have to be discarded and replaced with different equipment and ways of operating.
The most obvious element of this ‘world’ is the necessity to replace conventional take off and landing methods with completely different ways of launching and recovering aircraft using catapults and arresting gear – often described as ‘cat and trap’, or by the less elegant acronym CATOBAR (CATapult Operation Barrier [BUT?] Arrested Recovery). As will become clear, these techniques are complemented by a less obvious, but no less vital, culture of ‘naval aviation’ that successfully delivers combat power effectively, reliably, sustainably and safely. This culture drives the organisation & processes of the Royal Navy’s (RN’s) Fleet Air Arm (FAA)....”
http://www.phoenixthinktank.org/2012...erations-work/ OR
http://www.phoenixthinktank.org/wp-c...fcaropsPTT.pdf