A very big and hardy WELCOME to you Pioneer !!! I love your images on other forums, and the Mirage III powered by the Avon engine is a beauty of an aircraft. :eagerness:

Note Pioneer joined the forum 8 years ago (4 years before you) and has over 6 times as many posts as you here.

Yes, they extended both sides of the flight deck to maintain side-to-side balance of weights.

They got the added benefit of more aircraft parking & handling area.

http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?125653-Tony-Gaze-passes

I’ve been reading through the deployments, especially in the Vietnam era and have noticed some interesting things.

There are many deployments in the mid 60s on the big carriers where CVWs have a Crusader and Phantom squadron. But the same doesn’t happen with the transition from Skyhawk to Corsair II, one deployment the CVW will have all Skyhawk sqns and the next will have all Corsair sqns.

The Phantoms were the “all-weather BVR fleet-defense” fighter (replacing the F3H Demons), and the Crusaders were the “limited-all-weather WVR dogfighter” (replacing the F11F Tiger and the F4D Skyray)… they were partners, not competitors. The USN had a history of having a “hi-lo” fighter type pair aboard their carriers from the late 1940s on, and when the F-14 replaced the F-4 as the “all-weather BVR fleet-defense” fighter the F-4 dropped to the “low” slot (replacing the F-8), because of its “strike-fighter” capabilities.

The shift from the Skyhawk to the Corsair II required a significant investment in support equipment and personnel… a new engine type (TF41), new avionics, and so on. ~90% of the A-4 support equipment was usable for A-6s (same J52 engine), E-2s, and so on (radios, etc). With the delay required to fit the new support equipment it was easy to just assign two light attack squadrons with the same aircraft, to reduce logistics burden and personnel needs.

Another is that the 61 rebuilt F8B (F8L) and 87 rebuilt F8C (F8K) don’t seem to have been deployed on carriers, but the 225 rebuilt F8D&E (F8H&J) did get deployed on the last Essex class cruises. Perhaps the F8L&K went to the Marines or USN reserve sqns?

Interesting.

Exactly… the Marines and Navy Reserves got the rebuilds of the earlier models and the sea-going Navy got the rebuilds of the later models.

I’d love to know how regular embarking USMC sqns on carriers was in the 70s and 80s.

Go to this website: http://navysite.de/carriers.htm

Click on the name of the carrier you want to look at, then scroll down until you find a sentence like

Click here to get a view of the deployments of USS ORISKANY

Click on the hyperlink and you will get a chronological table of the carrier’s deployments, which will include squadron designation and aircraft type.

Taking the first deployment of CV-34 as an example, we find:
Date of Departure: May 15, 1951; Date of Return: October 4, 1951; Cruise Book: N/A; CVW: CVG-4; Squadrons (Aircraft): VF-43 (F4U-5); VF-62 (F2H-2); VA-45 (AD-2); VMF-122 (F2H-2); VC-4 Det. 8 (F4U-5N); VC-12 Det. 8 (AD4-W); VC-33 Det. 8; VC-62 Det. 8-51 (F8F-2P); HU-2 Det. 8 (HO3S-1); Tail code: F; Area of Operations: Mediterranean; Battle Group: N/A; Operations/Exercises: Operation Beehive; Ports of Call: Augusta, Sicily, Italy; Athens, Greece; Iraklion, Crete, Greece; Tripoli, Lybia; Naples, Italy; La Spezia, Italy; Cannes, France; Izmir, Turkey; Genoa, Italy; Gibraltar

So, in 1951 USS Oriskany CV-34 deployed with one Marine Corps F2H Banshee jet fighter squadron aboard (VMF-122).

Her next deployment with a Marine squadron was in 1962, with VMF-232 (F8U-1E) {F-8B Crusaders}.

The F5EM/FM were upgraded with new radar (Grifo-F), all-new avionics, a new cockpit with MFDs, and so on from 2001 to 2009.

They can now utilize Derby BVR missiles, Pirahna & Python WVR missiles, Litening 3 FLIR/laser pod, etc.

It would make no sense to conduct yet another modernization when the Brazilian Air Force is fighting to get a new fighter to replace first the Mirage 2000s and eventually the F-5s.

From memory they should have been Admiralty Standard diesels. The Leopard/Salisbury propulsion fit incorporated eight units of the ASR1 type and Mermaid was very closely related.

The 1973-74 Jane’s Fighting Ships entry says “similarity in hull and machinery with “Leopard” class.”

This agrees with Jonesy’s memory.

Elsewhere I found this:

Machinery: Diesel-reduction: 8 VVS ASR1 diesels, 2 English Electric reduction gearboxes, 2 shafts w/CP props