On May 20, 12:23 am, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Charles Talleyrand wrote:

id the change from F-14s to F-18s increase or decrease the total
:number of planes per ship? Overly simple math suggests that the
:amount of room needed to hold 22 F-14s could also hold 30 F-18s.
:
:If the number of planes did not increase, what happened to the extra
:space?
:
:-Curious
:-Charles Talleyrand
:
:
:F-18a Length: 17.10 m
:F-18a Wing Span: 9.3 m folded
:Area of bounding box: 159 sq m
:
:F-14 Length: 18.6 meters
:F-14 Wingspan: 11.4 meters swept
:Area of bounding box: 211 sq m

You're looking at the wrong airplanes. The Navy only operates a
handful of F/A-18A+ aircraft. The remainder of the 'legacy' Hornets
are C/D aircraft. The F-14 aircraft were replaced by F/A-18E/F
aircraft, which are physically about the same size as an F-14. There
is no real 'extra space'.

F-18E/F Length: 18.31 meters
F-18E/F Wing Span: 9.32 meters folded


I thought the F-14s were replaced by the F-18a, and the F-18e came
along much later. I'm willing to be corrected.

Using the F-18e data, the bounding box uses 171 sq meters, which is
still only 80% of the space needed by an F-14. Therefore one might
imagine though this simplistic analysis that 5 F-18s used as much
space as 4 F-14s.

Suppose we were only concerned about wingspan, and did not care about
length. This might be a model of a flightline. We still might guess
that 5 F-18s fit into the space needed by 4 F-14s, since the F-18
folded wingspan is 80% that of the F-14s.

So what happened to that extra space on the carrier?

-Still Curious
-Charles Talleyrand