In article , Mike
wrote:

Remember the famous World War 2 raid when those B-24 bombers were
placed on the USS Hornet and sent to bomb Japan ?

....the "30 seconds over Tokyo" raid.

I just got done reading that in 1965 the United States landed C-130
Herculees planes on a US aircraft carrier.

So that got me thinking. I'm not a Navy man or Air Force man, so this
question may sound crazy to some of you, but please at least address
it.

Let's talk hypothetically here. What if, at some point late in the
cold war the United States decided to stage a " Doolittle " type raid
on some country by having a small number of F-111 bombers take off
from a giant Nimitz class carrier. Could it have been done ?

Why bother when the F-111 could be ariel refueled?

Remember the 1986 raid on Libya ? Our F-111 bombers had to fly about
4,000 miles from their bases in Great Britain.

Thanks to French faggots that wouldn't give us permission to
overfly their precious country. Next time, we should just bomb Paris
and get it over with. Perhaps they would have been more cooprative
if we would have let the Nazis stay there for a few more years.

Or would the F-111 have been too big ? I'm not talking about storing
the planes below the carrier deck, or about having them return to the
carrier and land on it.

The F-111 was supposed to have a Navy version that was carrier ready,
but it never got off the drawing board. It was just too heavy to be
workable. The F-14 ended up doing the job.

The F-111 and C-130 are different kinds of planes. The C-130 is
a prop plane, and it has enough horsepower to do a short field
take-off. It can even be fitted with RATO bottles to help decrease
the take-off distance. The F-111, however, needs to get up to speed
in order to take off, and it takes great deal longer amount of
runway to do so as compared with the C-130. A carrier just wouldn't
be long enough.

But would it have been possible to have a special mission and have
F-111's take off from a carrier ?

Again, it just wouldn't be worth the effort. The only scheme that
I can see is that you would modify a number of F-111's with a beefed
up nose gear, and cat launch it with a near zero fuel load. That
might be light enough to get off of the deck. Once you get airborne,
then you would have to hit a tanker right away. But if you have to
tank anyway, why bother with the carrier?

-john-

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John A. Weeks III 952-432-2708
Newave Communications http://www.johnweeks.com
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