A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Non sequitur – Midway Magic and Melbourne mayhem May 8, 2013

I was browsing the internet last night, and somehow started reading about HMAS Melbourne, the last aircraft carrier to serve in the Royal Australian Navy.  Melbourne was one of many Magestic-class light fleet carriers the British were building at the end of WWII. The sudden end of the war left the British with many nearly complete aircraft carriers they could no longer afford. So the ships of this class wound up serving in many NATO and allied navies: HMCS Bonaventure in Canada, Karel Doorman with the Royal Netherlands Navy, Sydney and Melbourne to the Royal Australian Navy, and I think there were some more.  These were tiny ships.  I mean tiny. Even by WWII standards, they were quite small. They displaced only about 17,000 tons, compared to 27,000 tons for the massively produced American Essex-class.

During the stunning period of post-war military aircraft development from 1945 till about 1960, aircraft speeds and weight went up immensely.  Whereas a WWII aircraft might weight 10,000 lbs, by 1960 there were 70,000+ lb aircraft operating from carrier decks. And speeds went from a max of around 400 mph to 1500+ mph. These huge jets landed at twice the speed of the previous propeller driven planes. All that drove aircraft carrier development to larger and larger ships, culminating with the American nuclear powered Enterprise and Nimitz classes, ships of 1100 ft length and over 90,000 tons displacement.

Amazingly, in spite of the enormous changes in aircraft and aircraft carrier technologies, the tiny light fleet carriers inherited from Britain continued soldiering on well into the 1980s (and some, way beyond that).  The ships, with tiny, 700 ft x 100 ft flight decks (compared to 1100ft x 250 ft for an American supercarrier) and very low speeds (24 kts max vice 33+ for a supercarrier), continued to operate heavier and larger jet aircraft until their eventual demise.  The difference in size can be appreciated by bow-on shot of HMAS Melbourne in company of USS Midway (CV-41) – the smallest of the American supercarriers.

Operating high-speed aircraft like the A-4 Skyhawk from a tiny deck like this was, to say the least, adventurous. The aircraft you see on deck, S-2 Tracker piston-engine anti-submarine warfare aircraft, literally barely fit when landing, with only a few feet of clearance between the wingtips and the island.  Many American and even British pilots (the Brits having larger carriers, but nowhere near as big as American ones) refused to try to land on these tiny ships. But the Aussies did, and for decades.  But losses were very heavy.

Melbourne was always considered an unlucky ship.  She sank two other ships in collisions – one of her own navy, and one of the USN.  As I said, loss rates were high. And the ship, designed to operate in the North Atlantic and Arctic waters, was designed without air conditioning. Temperatures in the engine rooms could reach 170 degrees.  She was always a very uncomfortable, crowded ship. But, she served for nearly 30 years, and gave Australia a unique fixed wing carrier capability unequaled in the region.  Since Melbourne’s retirement in the mid-80s, Australia has not managed to field another carrier.

In contrast, the other ship in the photo above, USS Midway, was always considered one of the luckiest, most blessed ships in the fleet. She had an incredibly storied career. You can witness the advances in aircraft carrier development in photos by observing the changes to Midway between 1945 and 1969. When she was commissioned right at the very end of WWII, at 900 ft length and 45,000 tons, she was by far the largest carrier in the world:

But, she still had the straight, or “axial” flight deck arrangement, where aircraft took off and, more critically, landed, directly along the long axis of the ship.  This was very dangerous, because aircraft already landed were parked at the bow of the ship, and an aircraft landing later that had an accident could wind up sliding into dozens of aircraft parked at the bow. This happened on more than one occasion, and the losses were terrible.

So, in the mid-50s, Midway put in for a refit to add an “angled deck”, which added a protrusion on the port side of the ship to allow aircraft to land at an angle, so that if they overshot they would merely fall overboard, and not wreck the entire carrier air wing:

Bah, in the original post, I got fooled by CV-14 Ticonderoga!  Sorry for the mistake, but upside down, the 14 read as 41! I thought the angled deck looked too small.

But as aircraft got still bigger, heavier, and faster, even this change was not enough.  So, Midway was put in for the infamous SCB.101.66 refit, which would rebuild her from the hanger deck up as a supercarrier. It was the most intensive refit any US Navy ship ever underwent, and it resulted in massive cost overruns:

Needless to say, taking a ship that originally was much narrower, and displaced tens of thousands of tons less, and adding all that huge topweight associated with increasing the flightdeck from 2 acres to 4, absolutely shreded the ship’s handling characteristics. Whereas Midway had been rather nimble before, now she was a wallowing cow.  She sat several feet deeper in the water than she had before.  As more and more weight accumulated, her trim characteristics got worse and worse, until in the 80s she was put in again to try to correct her handling problems. Huge blisters were added to the side of the hull, but they actually made the problem worse.

By that time, Midway was homeported at Yokusuka in Japan. The ship was turned over to Japanese shipwrights, men who stunned the US Navy with their incredible skill and professionalism, and the handling problems were at least somewhat improved.  It is said that one of the reasons Midway lasted so long in service, nearly 50 years, was due to the skill of the Japanese who serviced her for the last 10 or 12 years of service.

Midway developed such a legend in the Navy, that there came to be a term for her exploits: Midway Magic. Some fer instances: Midway only had two catapults, vice the 4 on most supercarriers, but she would routinely launch as many aircraft with her two catapults, in the same amount of time, as those with 4. She had some operational exploits which were the stuff of legend, like NORPAC ’82.  Her air wings in Vietnam had one of the highest, if not the highest, kill-to-loss ratio of all the many carriers that served in that war. Throughout the war, Midway lost relatively few aircraft.

Midway was finally retired in 1992, after 47 years of service. Far, far longer than any other WWII carrier.  Always a lucky ship, instead of being scrapped or sitting in boneyard limbo forever like many of her sisters, she is now a museum in San Diego, CA, and one of the most popular attractions in that city.

This pic provides a nice overview of the change in Midway’s flight deck:

One more photo to show the advance in carrier design. This photo was taken at the now sadly closed Naval Air Station Alameda in San Francisco.  SanFran used to be a great navy town, until they decided to go insane.  It’s from 1974.  From left, CV-43 Coral Sea, very similar to Midway but slightly younger, then the last two WWII Essex-class with very small angled decks (any naval historians know why the angled deck was so small?  Couldn’t it have been larger if they offset a third elevator to port abaft the island and taken other topweight balancing measure?  They just look so small!) CV-19 Hancock and CV-34 Oriskany, probably my all time favorite carrier, then finally, CV-65 Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear powered aircraft carrier and, for a long time, the largest ship in the world. The Enterprise flight deck is 3/4 of an acre larger than Coral Sea or Midway’s, and over 2 acres larger than the Essex class, even after the angled deck was added with the SCB-125 refits!  Over 4 1/2 acres!

Alright, now some sequitur stuff.