China’s latest aircraft carrier, the Fujian, appears poised to leave port to begin initial sea trials. The development comes soon after five aircraft mockups appeared on the deck of the flattop, as you can read about here, and a little over three months since we got our best view of the warship in its completed form. Once the Fujian goes to sea, it will mark a hugely important step in the development of the country’s naval aviation, with the carrier being the first of its kind to be fully locally designed and also China’s first to launch aircraft via catapults rather than by a ‘ski jump’ takeoff ramp.
I mean, the US runs a bunch of amphibious assault ships like the Wasp and America classes and LPDs and stuff that don’t have a catapult either. They don’t do the ski jump, but same “aircraft’s own power is used to get above stall speed by the time it goes over the edge” thing.
For all I know, there’s no better way to launch an airplane off a boat. I just think it looks silly. It looks like the boat is made of rubber.
I’ve toyed with the idea of using huge rotary-wing drones to autonomously lift the aircraft, do launch and recovery. Then you don’t need a runway at all, and a lot of the constraints on the form of an aircraft carrier go away.
The US has been doing work on aerial aircraft carriers recently that can recover UAVs autonomously, so the recovery stuff is already being worked on:
https://www.twz.com/41042/gremlins-drones-could-be-reloaded-inside-their-mothership-transport-aircraft
But if you use a ship as a carrier, then you don’t have the kind of weight and payload limitations that you do with an aircraft.