Category FLIGHT and M ОТІOIM

n aircraft carrier is a warship built to carry airplanes. It is also a floating airfield: aircraft can take off and land on aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers have been nicknamed flattops for their long, flat decks.

History of Carrier Flying

The first vessel to carry any form of air­craft was a coal barge. The George Washington Parke Custis was converted during the American Civil War (1861-1865) to carry observation bal­loons for the Union Army. Experiments in naval aviation began before World War I. In 1910 Eugene Ely piloted a plane from a platform built on the deck of the cruiser USS Birmingham. In 1911 Ely successfully pioneered a system used to land airplanes on carrier decks when he landed on the deck of the battleship USS Pennsylvania. In 1918 U. S.-born Stuart Culley, flying with the British Royal Navy, made the first combat take­off from a moving ship (a converted barge towed by a British warship). He climbed to a height of 18,000 feet (5,485 meters) and shot down a German Zeppelin airship.

The U. S. and British navies began converting more ships to carry air­planes. In 1918 the British modified a merchant ship into a carrier, HMS Argus. The U. S. Navy’s converted coal ship USS Langley launched its first fighter plane in 1922. The navy then gained two converted battle cruisers,

Lexington and Saratoga, in 1927. The USS Ranger was built in 1934 as the first purpose-built flattop.

The planes flown from early carriers were biplanes, such as the Boeing F3B-1 of 1928. Some aircraft were fighters, while others were designed to carry

HELLCAT

The Grumman F6F-3 Hellcat entered U. S. Navy service in 1943. A single-seat carrier-based fighter, its top speed was 376 miles per hour (605 kilometers per hour). The Hellcat was armed with six Browning 0.5-inch (12.7-millimeter) machine guns. During World War II, U. S. Navy ace pilot David McCampbell shot down thirty-four enemy planes from his Hellcat, including nine on a single mis­sion over Leyte Gulf on October 23, 1944.

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torpedoes or bombs. Faster monoplane fighters came into service in the late 1930s. New carrier aircraft had adap­tations such as hydraulically operated folding wings. These wings were first tried on the Douglas TBD Devastator (1935), the U. S. Navy’s first carrier – based monoplane torpedo bomber.

Early airships were all nonrigid, which meant that their balloons collapsed without gas inside. An all-metal airship, called Metallballon, was tried in Germany in 1897, but it flew only once.

The next big step forward in airship design came in 1900. German engineer Ferdinand von Zeppelin built a rigid air­ship that kept its shape with or without gas inside it. It had a strong internal frame, or skeleton, made of metal gird­ers and wires. A fabric skin stretched over the frame. Inside were gas bags, known as ballonets, that were filled with hydrogen gas to lift the airships, which soon became known as Zeppelins, into the air.

BLIMPS

The 1884 La France was not rigid; it was simply a bag of gas, like a balloon, with a cabin and engine fastened beneath. Without gas to inflate it, the airship became limp. In 1917, American sailors gave the nickname blimp, short for "B-limp," to the U. S. Navy’s B-class, nonrigid airships. The blimps were 160 feet (48.8 meters) long and had a speed of 45 miles per hour (72.4 kilometers per hour). The U. S. Navy continued to use blimps until the 1960s. Non­rigid airships are still called blimps. Modern blimps, usually carrying advertising logos, are sometimes seen flying over cities. These aircraft, because they can remain fairly still, also make useful platforms in the sky for television and film cameras. Blimps are popular, too, for tourist flights over city landmarks.

Zeppelin’s first rigid Luftschiff Zeppelin, LZ-1, flew well, and the Germans went on to build bigger rigid airships to carry passengers on regular flights. The Zeppelin Deutschland began the world’s first commercial airship pas­senger flights in 1909. It seemed that airships might dominate aviation.

To leave the Moon in the early hours of July 21, Armstrong and Aldrin used the descent stage of the lunar module as a launchpad. Squeezed inside the upper ascent stage, the two astronauts blasted off and successfully rejoined Michael Collins in Columbia. The lunar module was then discarded, and a blast from a rocket in the service module sent the astronauts on their homeward course.

Before reentering Earth’s atmosphere, the astronauts seated themselves inside the cone-shaped command module. This was the only part of the Apollo
spacecraft with tough, outer insulating layers. The insulation would shield the crew from the searing heat, caused by air friction, that makes a spacecraft glow red-hot as it plunges back into the atmosphere.

The command module carried three large parachutes that opened during the final stage of descent, dropping the spacecraft safely into the Pacific Ocean. Apollo 11 splashed down on July 24,

1969. The astronauts, hailed as heroes, received a huge welcome. First, how­ever, they had to spend more than two weeks in isolation in a sealed medical chamber in case they had brought back any harmful infections from space. Fortunately doctors found none.