nezeray said:
I was trying to tell my wife about the benefits of the angled deck, but honestly can't remember then.
Feel free to refresh my memory.
Nezeray
Just tell her it helps when drunken pilots try to land :lol: . You see, by having a landing deck that's already crooked... ahh skip it; it wasn't that funny :roll:
If your question was real and wasn't a tease, I'll try a "dry" answer-
First, by angling the rear deck area, you can prevent a crash into parked aircraft when a landing attempt has to be aborted. I think they call it a "bolter" or something like that. If they don't catch any arresting cables, they need to hit the throttle very quickly to gain the altitude needed to clear the front area on a straight deck. In WW2, they would put up a net (like a tennis net) sometimes to stop the plane before it crashed into planes that had already landed. Now, when you angle the deck you can bolter the plane off to the left side and more safely clear the deck if you need to go around another time to land. The second advantage is that you can carry on with launching and landing operations at the same time by splitting the deck into two areas. This could never be done with a single straight deck. The third advantage is you can dedicate the center area on the deck for parking and rearming planes now that the deck doesn't follow-through. It's rather interesting that no WW2 carriers had an angled deck as it seems so simple now. Just to make it even seem
absurdly strange that no one thought of the idea and that they got close is that in the USN open deck carriers such as the original carrier Yorktown (CV-5) they could launch scout aircraft while landing other planes. What was done however was not an angled deck, but a side catapult down in the hull (in an opening in the side of the ship) that slung the plane sideways. I'll bet that was a load of fun (not!). It's pretty much the same method as launching floatplanes from cruisers, except the SBD scout was
not a floatplane (heh). If you didn't get airborn, you got submarine pay (get it?) :lol: .