Imagine if it had been an Iranian spy drone/aircraft that had been shot down/brought down/crashed over the USA…….

So Norway is buying the F-35 primarily as an interceptor?

…..The government has confirmed that it now envisages routinely deploying only twelve JSF aircraft on the carrier for operations, compared to the original thirty-six. And the requirement for daily sortie generation has been reduced from seventy-two to twenty. This suggests that the government could now be envisaging a total JSF buy of no more than fifty aircraft…..

Those numbers appear to make a complete nonsense of the size of the new carriers. What a shambles!

So was this a technological ‘bridge too far’?

Light Attack AT-6 Successfully Deploys Precision-Guided Munitions

Wonder would it take much to convert one of these or a Super Tucano to take-off and land on a carrier?

Actually, that $13.5 billion* is total cost for “first-of-class”… which includes design & development and shipyard adjustments for the new systems and equipment, as well as the actual ship.

The actual “per-ship cost” is ~$9 billion*, which is what is budgeted for the second “Ford-class CVN”… CVN-79 JFK.

Yes, this IS rather more expensive than the ~$5 billion* per ship for the last couple of Nimitz-class CVNs (CVN-76 & CVN-77), but not what your cost quote tries to convince us of.

Additionally, the new equipment and other changes mean that, if things work as planned, CVN-78 will cost about $5 billion less in “life-time operating costs” than will CVN-77 (in part by reducing the ship’s crew from 3,200 to about 2,200)… so the “total-life purchase & operating cost” of CVN-78 should be about $1 billion less than CVN-77!

* FY2009 dollars

$13.5 billion is the current Navy estimate of the cost of CVN-80.

The efficiency of an aircraft carrier, i.e. it’s overall ability to operate aircraft increases exponentially with the size of the ship, which is why carriers get bigger whenever the opportunity arises. As ship steel is relatively cheap compared to other aspects of warship design, you save little and cause problems for your crew by making the ship smaller, but gain greatly at little cost by making the ship bigger. The US CVNs are capable of simltaneous launch and recovery as a by product of their size and design, not because it was an important design requirement. If a notional 65,000 tonne CV costs say £2 Billion, reducing the size of the ship to 40,000 tonnes will not save a third of the cost, you will be lucky if it saves 2-5%. For that miniscule saving, you get a far less capable ship with reduced potential for future developments. American carriers designed and built in the early 50s (Forrestal class) were able to adapt without major modification to aircraft that were not even concieved when they were. If they were still in service today they would have no difficulty operating the current and future generations of naval aircraft. The smaller Essex class could not do this, and the Midways (at least CV 42 and 43) would struggle. Size matters with carriers

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the latest US supercarrier (~100,000 tonnes) will cost $13.5 billion. If you can get a 65,000 tonne carrier for £2 billion (~$3 billion), that’s less than a quarter of the price!

The key question is affordability. Even the American are baulking at the cost of carriers these days.

Why 36-40 aircraft?