mind you I thought the Brazzillian carrier was now defunct, but i keep hearing how brazil will be operating rafale off it (is she big enough)

Minas Gerais (ex-HMS Vengeance, completed 1945) was purchased from the UK in 1956, and heavily modernized in the Netherlands (work completed 1960). She was decommissioned in October 2001, and towed to India in 2004, where she was scrapped.

Sao Paulo (ex-MN Foch, completed 1963) was purchased from France in 2000. She is still in service.

HMCS Iroquois 5,100-tonne will soon be the oldest frontline warship in the western world with the 38-year-old in service.

Canada to spend billions to build new warships

Canada has unveiled a shipbuilding strategy that will spend more than 30 billion Canadian dollars over the next 30 years to build 28 large vessels for the Canadian Coast Guard and navy, as well as 100 smaller ships, Defense Minister Peter MacKay said Thursday.

MacKay said, at the CANSEC arms show in Ottawa, that the federal government will establish a long-term relationship with two Canadian shipyards for the procurement of the large ships, one to build combat vessels, the other non-combat.
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28 “large” vessels… for widely varying definitions of “large”.

The Bell P-59 Airacomet was a slug, with a maximum speed of 413 mph in 1944… the same as the XP-38 in 1939! Its maneuverability was abysmal.

The P-38, P-47, P-51, P-63, P-82, F4U, F8F, & even the large P-61 Black Widow all were faster.

Bf-109F/Gs could have caught it in a shallow dive, and it would have been easy meat for even Fw-190C/Ds, much less the Ta-152. Me-262s would have slaughtered them.

Several of the late-war Japanese fighters would have proved superior in combat to the P-59 as well.

The P-80 (F-80A) would have been a quite different prospect, being equal in speed* (and likely maneuverability) to the Me-262, but with a much more reliable engine!

* P-80 558 mph max
Me-262 559 mph max

An old maritime saying:

A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.

I’ve loaded your pic on my Photobucket page.

Click on the “quote” button on my post, and copy the entire image string… including the brackets & IMG statements (but not the quote statement).

Then paste that into a post on Wix, and it should work fine.

See this thread: Proposed Helldiver recovery

Or were you referring to this one: Helldiver crash site found in Oregon

The “bomber” recovered from Lake Michigan last year is a Dauntless.

The one from 87 (the last one), looks like it is in Company colours meaning that this would have been a trials aircraft- the info says that it’s an A-6E though I don’t see the FLIR turret, thus my logic works here again- it’s a trials aircraft from the company.

Look under the radome just forward of the nose gear. You will see a dark square… this is the “blank-off” plate that is bolted on when the FLIR turret is not installed.

As only A-6Es had the FLIR turret in the nose*, only an A-6E would have the “blank-off” plate.

As an aside… I can find lots of photos of A-6Es with the “blank-off” plate installed… the FLIR turret was not a “flight-essential” item… and if the Intruder was tasked with any mission other than delivery of a LGB/other precision-guided weapon, it wasn’t even “mission-essential”!

Thus, even in operational squadrons, they flew without one on perhaps 1/3 of their flights.

I know this personally… the last 6 of my 8 years in the USMC were spent repairing the FLIR turrets on west-coast USMC A-6Es.

Some carrier-based aircraft were experimentaly camouflaged for use during the Viet-Nam war, but that idea was promply abandonned, as became soon evident that handling at night of camouflaged aircaraft on a flat top was very dangerous!!!

The Wiki-waki article on the A-7 Corsair II says this:

During the war in Southeast Asia, U.S. Navy A-7 Corsairs were painted gloss gray/white in color while USAF A-7s were normally painted in full jungle camouflage paint schemes. The U.S. Navy did experiment with camouflage paint schemes for some of their aircraft during the war, but during landing operations, the flight deck crews found their duties complicated, due to the inherent changing of the weather conditions aboard a moving ship and the color coded uniforms of the flight deck crew; with the added dangers involved to an already cluttered flight deck, it was determined to keep naval aircraft readily visible for the sake of safety.

Apparently, the colored shirts of the flight-deck crew blended into the paint scheme, making it hard to see where they were, increasing the risk of injury in an already extremely hazardous environment.