Airborne Aircraft Carrier

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AbRaj

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From Wikipedia :An airborne aircraft carrier is a type of mother ship aircraft which can carry, launch, retrieve and support other smaller aircraft.[1]

The only examples to have been built were airships, although airborne aircraft carriers of various types appear in fiction.

Airship projectsEdit
The British Imperial Airship Scheme of 1924 initially envisaged an airship that could carry five fighter aircraft in military use, but this requirement was abandoned and the project saw only the civilian R100 and R101 airships to completion.[2]

USS Akron and MaconEdit

The Akron in flight, November 1931


A Sparrowhawk fighter attached to the trapeze beneath Macon, 1933

The two rigid airships of the Akron class, Akron and Macon, were built for scoutingduties for the U.S. Navy and operational between 1931 and 1935.

Following experiments with launching and recovering small aeroplanes using USS Los Angeles, the US Navy designed Akron and Macon with internal hangars able to house a number of Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawk biplane fighters. The fighters were launched and recovered using a "trapeze" mechanism.[3]

With lengths of 785 ft (239 m), Akron and Macon were among the largest flying objects in the world and still hold the world record for helium-filled airships.[citation needed] They were just 20 ft (6.1 m) shorter than the German hydrogen-filled airship Hindenburg.

Akron first flew on 8 August 1931 and Maconfollowed on 21 April 1933. The Sparrowhawk fighters became operational in September 1932. Akron was destroyed on 4 April 1934 and Macon on 12 February 1935.[4]

During her accident-prone 18-month term of service, the Akron served as an airborne aircraft carrier for launching and recovering F9C Sparrowhawk fighter planes. Akron was destroyed[5] in a thunderstorm off the coast of New Jersey on the morning of 4 April 1933, killing 73 of her 76 crewmen and passengers. This accident was the largest loss of life for any known airship crash.[6]

Macon was designed to carry biplane parasite aircraft, five single-seat Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawk for scouting or two-seat Fleet N2Y-1 for training. In service for less than two years, in 1935 Macon was damaged in a storm and lost off California's Big Sur coast, though most of the crew were saved. The wreckage is listed as "USS Macon Airship Remains" on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Lockheed CL-1201Edit
Main article: Lockheed CL-1201

The Lockheed CL-1201 was a study for a giant atomic-powered transport aeroplane. Having a wing span of 1,120 feet (340 m), one variant studied was an airborne aircraft carrier with a complement of up to 22 fighter aircraft carried under its wings.[7]

In fictionEdit
 
DARPA wants to build an Avengers-like flying aircraft carrier, to make drones even more effective
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Drones are an increasingly important part of the US military arsenal. Low-cost, low-risk, alternatives to manned aircraft, they are versatile while at the same time becoming increasingly powerful. However, their speed and range is typically much more limited than that of our manned aircraft. DARPA is looking to fix that shortcoming by soliciting ideas for airborne aircraft carriers — or as DARPA calls them “aircraft carriers in the sky.” Right now it is just a call for ideas, but it is likely only a matter of time until a solution is developed and deployed. Many of us in the ET bunker are hoping it will be at least as cool as the helicarriers used by S.H.I.E.L.D. in The Avengers.
Sound crazy? We’ve done it before and it worked!


To be recovered, planes would actually fly back onto the hook from which they were launched
On the face of it, the idea might seem a little far-fetched, but it won’t be the first time military aircraft have been launched and recovered from the air. The US Naval airships Macon and Akron (officially ZRS-4 and ZRS-5) were floating aircraft hangars and air fields all-in-one, designed for very similar reasons before World War II. In that era, the small bi-planes used for scouting had very limited range compared to the oceans we needed to watch. So these 1000-foot-long airships were designed to carry up to five F9C-2 Curtiss Sparrowhawk scout planes that could be launched and recovered using a trapeze-shaped hook system worthy of one of Houdini’s airborne stunts.
Amazingly, neither airship ever had an accident with its airplanes. Launch and recovery were flawless during the years they operated. Unfortunately, both ships were eventually destroyed in crashes due to bad weather, and the Navy discontinued the program. Now all that is left is the huge “Hangar 1” at Moffet Field, built to house the Macon. Anyone who has been to Silicon Valley has no doubt seen it and known that it had something to do with airships, but most don’t know the full story. The hangar was recently leased out to Google — $1 billion for a 10-year lease — where it will be conveniently located close to a new Google research campus, which is also being built on the former naval base.

Hangar 1 at Moffet Field — Home of the first airborne airship, gutted and ready for restoration [Image credit: Annie Cardinal]
What this means for our use of drones
DARPA believes that developing the capability for the aerial launch and recovery of drones would allow our military to combine the benefits of drones with the speed, range, and endurance of manned craft into a blended approach. While it stresses potential uses for “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” it also gives a nod to the increasing use of weaponized drones by saying the system would be useful for “other” missions as well. Eschewing a return to the old, slow airship era, DARPA suggests contributors look to planes like the military transporter C-130 for launch and recovery.
Respondents are invited to provide eight pages or less on how they propose modifying existing craft, and an analysis of the benefits that might provide — with a plan on how to get to system test within four years
DARPA wants to build an Avengers-like flying aircraft carrier, to make drones even more effective - ExtremeTech
 
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The Pentagon wants an airborne aircraft carrier to launch drones
By Dan Lamothe November 10, 2014

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency released this artist’s rendering to show its vision for a future aircraft carrier in the sky, capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft while in flight. (DARPA image)

In the 2012 movie “The Avengers,” Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and the rest of the gang flew on a massive aircraft carrier that carried dozens of planes through the air and disappeared from plain view with the help of a cloaking device. The idea that the U.S. military could develop something similar is still seen as far-fetched, but this much is true: a Pentagon agency has just launched a new effort to develop an airship sure to draw comparisons.


The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is exploring whether it would be possible to turn an existing plane into a flying fortress capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft. Doing so would extend the range of drones that gather intelligence and perform other missions while saving money and limiting the risks pilots take, DARPA officials said Sunday.

“We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become ‘aircraft carriers in the sky,'” said Dan Patt a DARPA program manager. “We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new [unmanned aerial system] designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies.”


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Unlike the Avengers’ heli-carrier, DARPA’s sky-carrier would likely use a plane like the B-52 Stratofortress bomber, B-1B Lancer bomber or C-130 Hercules cargo plane, according to a request for information released by the agency on Friday. Companies, universities and other organizations interested in participating must submit ideas by Nov. 26 and include “system-level conceptual designs,” including a feasibility analysis.

DARPA also left open the possibility “missile-based approaches” to launching drones in its request for information, and says those interested should provide a sense for how many drones could be launched.

It’s not the first time that the U.S. military has dabbled with sky-carriers. In the 1930s, for example, the U.S. Navy launched Sparrowhawk biplanes from helium-filled rigid dirigibles built by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Company. This video shows how they were recovered:



The two airships that launched planes, the USS Akron and USS Macon, both experienced catastrophic crashes. The Akron crashed in 1933 off the coast of New Jersey, killing 73 of 76 men on board, according to the Navy Historical Center. The Macon crashed two years later off the coast of California. Most of the service members on board survived, but the dirigible sank “effectively ending the Navy’s controversial, and trouble-plagued, program of rigid airship operations,” Navy officials said.

More recently, the Air Force investigated whether it could use a 747 jet as an aircraft carrier, commissioning a report from Boeing. The defense contractor sketched a concept in which part of the plane would be hollowed out, and “micro-fighters” would be developed to fit inside, according to briefing slides later released by the military.
 
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I recently came across a post on AH.Com about a proposed aircraft design from the 1970's. And to describe it as insane would be generous. Say hello to the CL-1201, a flying atomic-powered aircraft carrier with a crew of more than 800, and a complement of 24 aircraft. It seemed like the kind of thing that might be of interest here.

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In aviation, those who dare to dream are either visionaries or insane. The long road of aviation history is filled with dead-end side roads of designs that simply boggle the mind. Those designs aren't just limited to fanciful thinking by eccentrics, either. Lockheed in the late 1960s devoted a surprising amount of effort to one of my favorite designs that most certainly falls into the "YGBSM" category ("You Gotta Be Sh*tting Me"- the unofficial motto of the USAF Wild Weasels, allegedly what was said by the pilots and WSOs who attended the first briefing on what was then a secret project). At the time Lockheed's Skunk Works had been looking at the feasibility of building an ultra-large transport for the US military and heading into the early 1970s the design evovled into the CL-1201 tailless aircraft that would have been for lack of a better description, a flying aircraft carrier.

The CL-1201 would have weighed in at a massive 5,265 tons with a wingspan of 1,120 feet and a fuselage length of 560 feet (about 2.5 times the length of a Boeing 747) and would have stood 153 feet high. Four massive turbofans would have provided a total thrust of 500,000 lbs. At altitudes below 16,000 feet, the engines would run on standard JP-5 fuel but once at cruise altitude, the engines would switch over to nuclear power, a single nuclear reactor aboard using liquid sodium metal as a cooling medium would transfer energy via heat exchangers to a non-radioactive secondary loop (what's called a closed-cycle nuclear engine). The heat transfer would be used to superheat the incoming area and expel it as jet exhaust. The reactor core would have been 30 feet in diameter with an output of just below 2,000 megawatts. This would have allowed the CL-1201 to cruise at over 30,000 feet at Mach 0.8 for as long as 41 days.

But that was only just part of the utter insanity of this design. It's immense size makes it likely it was probably a flying boat though schematics do show a fairly robust landing gear that may have been for ground handling. In addition to the four giant dual-propulsion turbofans, it also had 182 lift jets- that's right, lift jets. Possibly to shorten the takeoff run, but imagine something this size being VTOL! Two retractable banks of 24 lift jets were in the forward fuselage with the rest of the lift engines distributed along the wings aft of the rear wing spar, giving a total thrust of 15 million pounds!

Two versions of the CL-1201 were proposed- the first one would have been the LSA (Logistics Support Aircraft) which would have been a transport capable of carrying several hundred combat troops and their equipment directly to crisis points worldwide. One substudy even suggested using a 707-type transport to dock with the CL-1201 LSA to shuttle troops and personnel to and from the ground.

The other even more fanciful version was the AAC (Attack Aircraft Carrier). With 845 crewmembers, the AAC could carry 22 multirole fighter aircraft on special docking pylons under the wings. The pylons were large enough to allow fuel, rearmament, and maintenance access to the aircraft. A small internal hangar bay would have carried two small transport aircraft for shuttling personnel to and from the AAC. The defensive armament of the AAC is unclear, but there was suggestion of using AIM-54 Phoenix missiles for self defense as well as the defense provided by its own air wing. There were substudies as well for versions that could have launched battlefield ballistic missiles or function as airborne control centers.

At what point the CL-1201 design faded into obscurity isn't quite clear and there are suggestions that such design work was probably conducted more as an engineering exercise than a serious aircraft proposal. Regardless, the Lockheed CL-1201 flying aircraft carrier remains as one of the most outlandish designs ever worked on by a major aerospace company.​
Tails Through Time: The Lockheed CL-1201 Flying Aircraft Carrier


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The Madness of the Lockheed CL-1201
 
The first goal of an airborne aircraft carrier is to stay airborne for a long while. There's not much point if it has to land earlier than the aircraft that are supposed to return to it. So the main problem is to keep your carrier airborne.

To keep something in the air, there are two possibly approaches:
1. Make it go fast enough to stay airborne.
2. Make it lighter than air so that it simply floats.

Problem with the first approach is that it requires a lot of energy. The logistics to refuel your aircraft carrier would likely be enough to make it not worth it -- it'd be simpler to use these tankers to let normal aircraft operate very long missions from normal air bases than to keep an ogre aloft. That's why the Lockheed CL-1201 design was based on the assumption of using nuclear power to keep it airborne. However, our understanding of the drawbacks of nuclear energy has greatly increased since the 1060s. Back then, they wanted to use the power of the atom for everything; nowadays we're a lot more restrained and we no longer seriously think about, for example, digging a tunnel with nuclear bombs.

Problem with the second approach is that air is already very light. So using gases lighter than air doesn't give you a lot of buoyancy. I think you need something like one litre of helium to gain one gram of carry weight? Seems so. So to lift one kg of payload, you need one thousand litres of helium; and to lift one ton, you need one million litres. One million litres correspond to 1000 m³. A small naval aircraft carrier like the retired INS Viraat approached 30000 tons of displacement with a full load, meaning you'd need thirty thousand times one million litres of helium to turn it into an airship. A cubic envelope for that much helium would be over 31 km long on each side. Let's just forget about this.

You're never going to get an airborne equivalent of a naval aircraft carrier. Physics work against you.

So, you cannot scale up existing planes and dirigibles to create an airborne aircraft carrier like the one you see in The Avengers or in the Ace Combat series. Therefore, what you have to do instead is scale down the aircraft it carries.

The only potential doctrine for an airborne carrier is to operate small drones. The kind of small drones that have a very poor autonomy due to limited volume for fuel or batteries. That in turn requires finding a potential military use for them, which would be compatible with deployment from a "mothership" airplane.

There's an additional complication if you want to be able to recover the drones. That means they have to be able to catch up with your carrier, and for small reusable drones it means either the drones can fly fast enough (which requires more energy, when autonomy is already their main problem) or the carrier can fly slow enough.
 
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