NAVY: Floating Airfields

Another unit of the greatest fleet of aircraft carriers in the world last week got her commission from the Navy. She was the 20,000-ton Hornet (cost: $31,000,000), whose broad decks can accommodate 80 planes. The addition of the Hornet brought the number of active U.S. carriers up to seven, ranging in tonnage from the 14,500-ton Ranger to the 33,000-ton Lexington and Saratoga, which were started as battle cruisers before their conversion in 1927. Although numerically the British and Japanese are credited with superiority over the U.S. in carriers—England has eight, Japan nine—the U.S. aircraft fleet can handle almost as many planes (800) as the other two put together.

Abuilding are eleven other carriers with a plane capacity equal to or better than the Hornet’s. How many the British and Japanese have under construction is not known. But it is known that the Japanese are busy as beavers turning out small carriers, which the Nipponese fancy. Balancing this activity, the U.S. Navy is doing a fast job of converting Maritime Commission cargo-passenger ships into auxiliary carriers. Already in service is the first, U.S.S. Long Island. Four of her sisters, originally completed as cargo ships, will be commissioned as auxiliary carriers within six months. Two more, still abuilding, can be completed as carriers within a year. The Long Islands, which can make 17-18 knots, have room for 20 planes and are ideal for convoy duty. Unlike their big sisters, who stay far behind the fleet during combat, they will travel safest in the middle of convoys.

The aircraft carrier has come a long way since the experimental Engadine, a converted Channel steamer, first sent aloft an observation plane to find out for Admiral Beatty what was going on at the beginning of the Battle of Jutland. (The plane wobbled home with a broken gas pipe and the news that the Germans were heading south, but the Engadine failed to get this intelligence to the Fleet.) Throughout the early ’20s U.S. Navy men agitated for first-class carriers, got two of the best when the Lexington and Saratoga were commissioned in 1927. First U.S. ship specifically designed as a carrier was the Ranger, which slid down the ways at Newport News in 1933. Almost all the regular U.S. carriers of today are designed to do around 30 knots, and none in the world is as big as the Lexington and Saratoga. Last week came a report that, in case of war, the U.S. might seize, rebuild and commission the biggest, fastest, costliest aircraft carrier in history: the 83,000-ton, 35 -knot liner Normandie, now “under pro tective custody,” which cost the French Government $65,000,000.

To naval experts the Normandie has never appeared to be just a luxury liner. Say they: “A blind man could tell what this ship was supposed to do for her country in wartime.” They point out that almost every construction detail of the Normandie makes for easy conversion. With her enormous length (1,029 feet), her broad beam (119 feet), she has plenty of space for a fine flight deck. Her two working stacks (the third is a dummy) are both fed by flues that run up her sides to her topdeck. It would be a simple job of reconstruction to shift the funnels to the sides. Her four main passenger elevators are grouped in one big shaftway.

Throwing them all together, ship builders could install a platform elevator large enough to move aircraft to the flight deck.

Just how long it would take to convert the Normandie is anybody’s guess. Esti mates ran as low as six months.