The “large light cruiser” Furious received first a flying-off deck forward (in place of one of her two 18-inch guns) and then a flying-on deck aft. They seemed so important that the Royal Navy chose to complete a new battleship, HMS Eagle, as a carrier (her sister ship was the battleship HMS Canada).
The British in particular demonstrated that carriers (and shipboard aircraft in general) had become a necessary part of fleets.
Several, most notably the British, converted merchant ships into primitive aircraft carriers during World War I. Several ships were so modified, carrying large seaplanes that would land alongside when they returned.Īt about the same time in 1911, other navies were experimenting with launching aircraft from ships. Instead, work proceeded on a catapult whose fixed track would cover the after guns of a large cruiser. However, landing-on and flying-off decks at both ends of a ship were seen as an excessive sacrifice. officers were impressed they understood that aircraft could change naval warfare by giving fleet commanders much wider vision.
18, 1911, he landed on the cruiser USS Pennsylvania, whose fantail had been partly covered by a temporary deck equipped with what we might now call arresting gear ropes. 14, 1910, when an intrepid aviator named Eugene “George” Ely strapped bicycle inner tubes across his chest as a crude flotation device and, so equipped, flew his Curtiss pusher aircraft off a temporary deck rigged over the bow of the cruiser Birmingham. The story of naval aviation, however, can be said to go back even further, to Nov. Ford-class aircraft carriers represent the newest chapter in a story that began a century ago with the commissioning of USS Langley (CV 1), the nation’s first aircraft carrier, on March 20, 1922.
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