Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and how the tech are youa This time for a classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published April six, twenty It is called How Aircraft Carriers Work? Part One. I bet you can't guess what next week's classic episode is gonna be. So we're gonna be talking a lot about the current state of the art, which is the Nimits class aircraft carrier. We'll talk about the next generation, we'll talk about previous generations. But to start it all off, I wanted to explain how amazing, how old this this idea is. It actually pre dates controlled flight. Yes right, you know, I don't know a whole lot about this, because we did. We were digging into aircraft carriers and just kind of as a side note of some some article that I was reading, it had mentioned that in the late nineteenth century they were using ships to launch manned balloons right for reconnaissance, U missions and things like that. It was always it was always about reconnaissance, and it was about monitoring the enemy. Right, because in the nineteenth century, the navies around the world, we're relying heavily upon battleship class dreadnoughts, these enormous ships with heavy weaponry on them that would batter one another. That was how naval battles were decided back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so much so that any idea, like any thought of using air support was mainly just to get a look around and see where the enemy was. Like that was the only purpose, right. They were not thought of as this would be We're gonna weapon eyes balloons. It was more like, we need eyes in the sky so that we know where the enemy might be. Well, even during the American Civil War they use balloons, uh, they would. They would flow a balloon from their camp to check out what the enemy was doing, you know, on the other side of the hill, and then bring it back down. But then the intent was never to to fire from up there anything. It was just to keep an eye on the on the enemy exactly exactly. And that's the same thing is true with the earliest days of aircraft carriers in the in the respect the way we think of them now, what surprised me was that it did not take long at all from the moment that we have controlled flight that is a heavier than air aircraft that can fly through the control of a human being, and the first attempts at making an aircraft carrier. So I know that there is some disagreement about who was truly responsible for the first heavier than air aircraft. We're gonna go with the right brothers for this one. And they flew at Kittie Hawk in nineteen o three. It took less than a decade before the United States military started saying, maybe we can launch one of these suckers from a boat. Yeah, not a bad idea. Yeah, I mean, that's that's always the kind of the way it goes right with the military. They're thinking, they're thinking, well, you know what, this could be a devastating machine of war. Exactly where can we make this work for us? And that's that's exactly what they did. They said, well, let's, uh, let's try to figure out a way to make it. Well, they need a nice big takeoff and landing area, but well, there's no way really to do that on a boat unless we build something that's maybe made out of wood, that's a huge flat deck. Let's try that. And they did and it worked. Yeah, it was. It was crazy. They built They built a temporary wooden deck on top of the USS Birmingham in nineteen ten. This was truly just an experiment, right, it was just a proof of concept, and they found a break A man, or some might say lunatic to attempt to fly a tiny biplane, a Curtis biplane fifty horsepower, fifty horsepower, a fifty horse power biplane. Can you imagine you're rolling down this wooden this wooden platform that's built on top of a battleship. It's the battleship was not meant to do this, right, it was they had to shore up all this area to create a a wooden structure for you to roll across, not necessarily knowing if you would be able to reach the right speed to be able to take off, or if you would just plunge off the end into the ocean. Yeah, yeah, this is a this is a scary prospect having for this guy. I mean his name is he was actually a civilian pilot. His name was Eugene Burton Eli And uh, this is so strange the way this is written, and I'll read it the way it's written, and then I'll explain because it sounds so weird. It says on November four, a twenty four year old civilian, civilian in pilot again Eugene, took off in a fifty horsepower Curtis plane from the bow of the Birmingham, which is a you know, wooden platform cruiser again and later landed a Curtis model D on Pennsylvania in on January eighteenth of nineteen eleven. So those of you that were listening while, we'll realize that it wasn't a two month flight and he didn't change planes in mid air. They just hadn't figured out the landing bit of this yet. Yeah, So so this happens like two months apart or three months apart maybe, so, ye know what happened was they did the first one, uh, and then the second, the second attempt. The second test took place in San Francisco Bay. That's where the Pennsylvania was anchored, and he took off from a from from a landing strip on on land, took off, flew out to the ship, landed on it, stayed for an hour, took off from the ship and landed back on the mainland. Interesting, so that's actually the first time that both both of those things happened at one time. That the initial uh, you know, the initial takeoff I guess was it was just a one time deal and they just wanted to see if they could do it. They didn't even really considered landing at this point. I'm sure they were thinking about it, but they weren't willing willing to risk it yet. They needed a couple more months to to develop a way to do it, or maybe to look into the stats of how long it took a Curtis Model D to stop actually come to a stop, right, Because, yeah, if it's longer than the boat is, you've got yourself a problem. As it turns out, we would come up with ways to address that problem. Now here's the interesting thing to me. The U. S. Military was very quick to test out this idea, but they were not quick to implement it. Uh. The Navy at the time was largely of the United States Navy, I should say, it was largely of the opinion that this was still the domain of the big battleships, and soon the cruisers would follow. Cruisers would be slightly smaller slightly more maneuverable, faster ships than battleships. And we're talking about World War one era, yeah ships, yeah, pre World War One, into World War One, the United States was not terribly concerned with adding air power to that. However, the British were definitely interested and they began to innovate in this space early early on. UH. They began to experiment with navy ships. First, they were using essentially a version of of water landing planes like seaplanes, but they were those are very slow there. Once they landing and taking off the slow and getting them aboard a ship required the use of cranes. So it was it was not a good process if you were under the possibility of being under fire from an enemy quick exactly. So they started looking into other UH possibilities and it was the British Navy in nineteen eighteen that commissioned the first true practical aircraft carrier. It was the h M S Argus. Interesting and so the Argus is our first practical aircraft carrier. It had a large flat deck, which became standard for all aircraft carriers following ever since UM and that allowed for the landing and taking off of aircraft. It was also the first that had an electrically powered elevator to move aircraft from the hangar deck to the flight deck. Very smart and it's something we still see today. Yes, and that means that you can actually carry a lot more vehicles. Plus you don't have to worry like if if really bad weather is coming in, you can house them in the hangar deck as to as opposed to having them have to secure them to the flight deck, which could be pretty dangerous to put. You know, these are huge vehicles. So that lays the groundwork for the beginning of aircraft uh aircraft carrier history. But we're gonna skip ahead to how they work today and then later on I'll tell you more about the various classes of aircraft carriers that the United States specifically has used over the history of the Navy. Can I can I maybe just one thing here, and maybe I'm jumping too far ahead, but during World War One their use was extremely limited. They really didn't even put any kind of emphasis on it at all. It really wasn't part of World War One strategy in any way. But during World War Two they played a critical role. Instrumental, yeah, extremely critical because and this is I found this interesting. There was a side note about one of the battles um that was fought during World War Two, and it said that the Battle of the Coral Sea became the first sea battle in history in which neither opposing fleet saw the other one. That is so interesting. I mean, imagine that there's a there's a sea battle happening where you don't see the other ship because the battle is being fought by the planes in the air that they're launching towards each other. I mean, it's it's such a strange thought that before that that never happened. Exactly. You had you had planes that were dropping bombs, They're dropping torpedoes, so the planes were the weapons, right instead of instead of ships firing guns at one another, there s launching planes at one another. And this is so far apart they cannot see each And this is so interesting because I mean, if you think about it, and again you have to put yourself in the mind frame, you know that they were back in the nineteen forties. This is brand new because if you wanted to get a plane over a sea battle first, you probably wouldn't know where it's happening, and you wouldn't be able to communicate that and get that coordinated in time before something has already happened. The other thing is that the range was just too great for them, because fighter planes are often you know, weighted down with lots of lots of artillery, and they don't have great range. They have a shorter range than plane that's designed to fly long distances that don't carry a bunch of you know, extra weapons, you know, guns, whatever. Um. So this is a this is a brand new idea that we're going to take the planes to the battle and and you know, launch them from there instead of having to kind of you know, keep them far far away and then maybe they'll make it, maybe they won't. If they decide that they can't you know, hold out long enough to get there, they'll have to turn back. It's just it was a completely different way of thinking and and and it's just such a fascinating time in history when you look back at some of the side notes of all these battles and the way that they were fought. It's just completely different from World War One, completely different. Well, really, what what had happened was even during the World War One era, the navy navies around the world looked at aircraft carriers again as a means of carrying reconnaissance vehicles. Planes were not terribly useful in warfare, yet at that point they were very useful for finding out where the enemy fleets were so that you could direct your fleets and do the most damage possible. And what what really changed was that you know, you would think of like an aircraft carrier was an escort to a battleship, and the battleships were your your big boys. Those were the ones that actually did the damage until the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, the ships that were uh that were docked at Pearl Harbor were battleships, but the aircraft carriers were out on maneuvers. So the Japanese attack affected the battleships but not the aircraft carriers, which meant that the United States was forced to reevaluate their their strategies and they were forced to use aircraft carriers as weapons as opposed to a means of just reconnaissance. And that's what led to these things like the Battle of the Coral Sea, where we end up getting this effect of of of aircraft carriers being used effectively as weapons of war. Well also, and I think this goes without saying, that the Japanese fleet was launched from an aircraft carrier as well, so that the the the squadrons that attacked Pearl Harbor came from an aircraft carrier that was what several miles off, but you know, stealthily moved in and uh and and and was able to retreat back to the homeland. Right. It was incredibly effective. It was a devastating attack, as we all know. And so this was really what ended up changing the way wars were fought, uh for for several decades. And so it was it was something that that proved the aircraft carriers importance as a vehicle in in an arsenal Right, as you just mentioned, you know, the you know, it was that the aircraft carrier was the support vehicle or the yeah, the the add on vehicle, the um the chaperone I guess should go along, right, And then the roles reversed. I mean then it became that you know, the destroyers and the cruisers and all those were um tagging along with the aircraft carrier because that was the big guns, right, Yeah, you had those there to protect the aircraft carrier, because the aircraft carrier had all the really valuable aircraft on it that could do devastating damage very very quickly. So it was interesting to see such a dramatic shift, and it was. It was a dramatic shift that, by the way, did not happen smoothly. That it took the work of lots of people in the Navy to convince other branches of the military that this, in fact was the best way of going forward. We'll talk a little bit about some of the um interesting battles in the United States that had nothing to do with using weapons or fighting an enemy. It was really the battles being fought between different branches of the military, particularly the air Force and the Navy. There's a there's a story about the aircraft carrier that wasn't. It was one that was almost but then wasn't. But let's talk a little bit about how these massive and I really do mean massive machines work. Now you have seen one in person, I have been on the Midway. Okay, i've seen one in person. I've never been on one. Yeah, you gotta pack a lunch if you're gonna walk from one side to the other. They are big. They are huge. I mean we're talking like I'm just gonna ballpark these numbers. So we're talking like more than a thousand feet long. The deck is measured in acres, something like four or five acres four and half acres um. They are like it's like taking a building. I think I read somewhere that it was like, imagine the which building is in New York, the Chrysler building in New York until the the Chrysler building on its side. Put it in water, and that's the length of the built of the of the ship. But then even greater than that. It's like it's twenty stories tall when it's floating. Yeah, yeah, it's got it's you know, if you go from the keel of the ship, the keel is the backbone of the ship, the part that's at the very bottom center, all the way to the very top. You're talking like the equivalent of twenty four stories amazing. I mean, it's it's a huge, huge machine with thousands of parts, two thousands, well billion of billion parts or something like that is what I read somewhere. I don't know if that's true or not, but I mean they literally said it's a billion parts on on these ships. And it's it's truly like running a city because there are thousands of crew members. We'll talk about numbers when we get to it here, but yeah, there are thousands of people on board and they have to do everything, you know, from collecting the garbage to um making sure that you know, people are fed, and of course fighting war, maybe potentially running just you know, doing regular missions. I guess, you know, if they're they're just stationed off the coast of you know, whatever country, they just have to make sure that everything is operating smoothly. Um. There's just every concern you would have with a with a small city is happening on that ship and there has to be somebody to take care of it. A small city that relies on nuclear power, because that makes it even more complicated. So all modern supercarriers use nuclear power to generate steam. The ones that we talked about today have two nuclear power plants on them. Uh that are that's actually different from previous ones. Earlier supercarriers had more nuclear power plants, not fewer, but more because they had a bunch of smaller ones. But there were there are as many as eight, yes, with like four different shafts that steam would go through to turn propellers, so you you generate steam. I mean really, if you talk about old aircraft carriers, you're still talking steam. But in those days that you're talking about a boiler that's being uh, that's being uh heated through using fossil fuels. Today we're talking about using nuclear power to heat up water to turn it to steam. It turns steam steam turbines, which do two things. Two main things. It generates the energy needed to turn the massive propellers. We're talking like more than twenty feet in diameter, right, These are huge propellers that that uh that propel the ship through the water, and they are used to generate electricity on board the ship. I've got a little bit more info on that, if you like, we can talk about it. I just want to just kind of throw some stuff in here, and you're gonna hear a bunch of notes shuffling because I got notes everyone too. This is the first for me because usually I have my computer in here, but actually I'm using the stuff called paper on low tech. Like, yeah, that's kind of crazy. I do it all the time, low tech low tech. Alright, So, um, the US Enterprise. USS Enterprise was which was built in nineteen fifty eight, well, actually built between n and nineteen sixty one. This is a big ship. This is an enterprise class ship because there was a previous ship that was also known as the U. S. S Enterprise. And by the way, neither of these were the ones that carried Kirk and Spock. Good point. I'm glad. I'm really glad you pointed that out. Yeah, although I think they did visit it and Star Trek for the voyage home. Maybe maybe they went because they said, Captain, we found the vessel and it's the Enterprise. Anyway, Okay, I'm amused by this. Alright, So al right, it was in service between nine and two thousand and twelve, so it's only recently decommissioned. UM. This was the first, the very first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and it had eight what they called A two W reactors. Now the A two W. I was wondering what the heck that stood for, so I looked it up. UM. It's pretty simple. Actually, A is just aircraft carrier too. Stands for the second generation designed by that that UM, that particular UM designer. I guess that contractor and W stands for Westinghouse and that was the contractor, so A two W. So that's the second generation from the Westinghouse aircraft carrier power source, all right, and UM used in Okay, so of course it was used in you know, the first you know, this is the first nuclear powered and I'm gonna say nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear, yeah, nuclear nuclear, I might say it, but you know, get ready for that. But it actually it UM provided power for four propulsion plans. So each each propulsion plant had two reactors that were tied to it. And Okay, according according to the way that it's all laid out, I guess they each powered two different chefts. So let's say there's the one A shaft, the one B cheft, the two A shaft, the two B seft, And that's kind of the way it worked, right, all right, And I'll try to try to walk through this carefully here so we don't miss too much. I know it's going to be a simplified version. UM. But each one of these was capable of running on just one reactor if it had to, but two were required for full power. So if they're gonna steam ahead, it was a top be like thirty knots maybe, which is about which is about thirty four point five mile. Actually, the Navy has been very careful to never divulge the the specifics. There were some sources I saw where they said they could move in excess of forty knots, which is incredible speed. At that speed, you can water ski behind the aircraft carrier without skis would bear with the water ski behind it. I would like to try that. That would be kind of exciting. Yeah, all right, So, UM, so you could run on one, you know, one reactor per cheft, but they said it was you know too are required for full power and you know, for plane launching capability, which we'll talk about why that's important in a little while. UM. Now again the simplified version of how these reactors work, if you if you want to get into it or not, I don't know. UM it's they're actually fueled by enriched uranium two thirty five. And all this is is foreign to me. I'm like that I'm speaking another language, so bear with me. But they use um something called halfnium control rods, you know, karactor, and that's how that's how they control um, just how much scheme they're creating able to to submerse or or pull them out to a level that reaches what they're called the criticality point. And I hope I'm saying that right. But that's the point which nuclear fission reactors reach a place where they're self sustaining. Yes, they they create their own energy. What's happening is that when when one of those atoms decays, it generates some very high energy particles, which when they collide with other atoms, cause them to decay, and then you get a self sustaining reaction, which, by the way, if you aren't able to contain, becomes a meltdown. So so anytime we're talking nuclear power with fission, it's a very uh scientific approach, a delicate balance to make sure that you have the balance between generating the heat you need so that you can create the steam you need to turn a turbine and preventing it from getting out of control. Yes, and that's part of you know why they have these cool down towers and all that, right, So their their water cooled and that's where the steam is created because of the cooling water that they use for these things. So the steam or the the and then this is again very very simplified because there's a lot of processes that happened here. But the steam is sent to the main engine area, UM, you know for the electrical generators, UM, the air aircraft catapult system, and lots of other auxiliary features that that they'll talk that they mentioned here in this article. UM so runs just about it. Actually it does run everything on board, so anything I mean you flip light switch that's being run by while steam power, but from nuclear from a nuclear rear. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. So the turbines, which are double ended, are then caused to spin at a high rate of speed from from the steam and the main shaft UM, which which is you know, spinning with the turbine, you know, at the very very high rate of speed. It goes through a reduction gear which kind of steps down the power to a point where they're able to use it even to prepare all the ship. Because those propellers are giants. They're like twenty one ft across and there's four of them, huge huge screws on these things, and for them to even be able to use that power, there's so much power there that they have to reduce the power in order to be able to propel the ship forward. Right, I can imagine like what's really important there, at least initially, is the torque you gotta create. You gotta create the torque necessary to get those things moving. I would think it's important. Y. Yeah, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Uh So why go with nuclear power in the first place? Well, the big reason is that you don't need to refuel for many, many years. Yes, no range anxiety. That's what I was. I wrote that down here in this when I when I wrote that self sustaining part, I wrote down no range anxiety. That's amazing. So they can go out and they can spend a year out at sea if they want to, two years or three years or whatever, and and you know they're able to. Obviously food would be something that they would need. Supplies for water not so much, because they have desalination plants. They can actually convert seawater into drinkable water. But it does mean that they don't have to refuel, uh nearly as frequently. When they do refuel, that's a multi year process because nuclear fuel is snow joke. But it they can go decades before needing to refuel. It's amazing. Amazing. I'm gonna say that over and over again. You're gonna be saying something. I'm just gonna say, that's incredible. That's amazing. And another thing that makes this really uh interesting is not from the technological point of view, but from the political point of view. Aircraft carriers are considered sovereign territory. So as long as that sovereign territory does not venture too close to say, a country's borders within it, you know, that extent out from the coast, out a certain number of miles into the ocean, as long as the aircraft carry years outside of that is technically a part of whatever nation owns that aircraft carriers. So in the United States sense, you are on US quote unquote soil while you're on an aircraft carrier. Even if that aircraft carrier is parked way out and you know, in in the Middle East or in Asia or wherever, you're still on US soil. I like that idea. Yeah, So it really is like a floating city, you know, is the city itself can actually relocate. Uh. So let's talk a little bit about some of the different parts of this. We we mentioned that the top deck is the flight deck, that is, of course, where all the planes take off and land. In the old days, we're talking propeller planes. These days were talking jets. Uh. The the design of aircraft carriers has had to change dramatically along with the evolution of aircraft, and we'll talk more about that when I get into the different classes of aircraft carriers. One of the things that you mentioned, Scott was the steam powered catapult. And you guys might be wondering, what is that. What do you mean by catapult? Is there like an medieval catapult that you put the plane in and it launches it? Not quite, No, no, Well, the idea is that you know, with with the advent of of jet aircraft and the idea that you want to put them on a on a boat and launch them. That requires a lot of airflow over the surface of the of the wing in order for it to get enough lift to be able to get off this ship. Right and that, and they have a they have a truncated uh, takeoff strip right because it's they're limited by the length of the vessel. And it's not even the full length of the vessel, no, it's it's part of it. So it's like three basically yeah. So there are two things that aircraft carriers due to to improve the ability of jets to take off. One is they turn into the wind and they go as fast as they can into the wind, which generates more airflow. That is so smart, right, You don't want to go away because then that reduces airflow. So they turn into the wind and they go as fast as they can to general airflow. And then they have to find a way to have these jets accelerate rapidly so that they can get to a speed where they can take off. And that's where this steam catapult comes in. And it looks like a slot on the deck of the ship and that's all it looks like. Really, and if you you know what, I'll be honest with you, I think this matches up with a lot of the way that they're launching some current roller coasters. Now, yeah, you've seen this. I can't. There's one in um see your point in Michigan, I mean sorry, in Ohiole and it's called top fuel dragster I think. And you sit on the launch pad and it's going to the roller coaster you have. Okay, So it's the same idea. You can probably describe it. I mean it's it's it's steam pressure that builds it, and I don't know if it's steam. In that case, it builds up pressure in the cylinder and you're holding it back. You're you're you're resisting that. Yeah, you're allowing that pressure to continue to build. There's a piston that's at the end of the cylinder, and behind that piston is where you're building up this incredible amount of pressure. Keep in mind, the steam is coming from the the nuclear power generator. That's what's that's what's creating the heat, that's creating the steam. So there's plenty of it. There's no shortage of steam here. And just build and build the pressure until you've reached the right amount, which by the way, is determined by a flight controller and it's based upon the type of aircraft that needs to launch and the current deck conditions. Again, very smart, because they found out that you know, uh, certain planes require more force to be able to launch at a certain speed, and if you don't do it hard enough, it's gonna go right off into the ocean and that's bad news for everybody. Exactly. So, the the aircraft have what's called a toe bar, which connects into the shuttle. The shuttle is the element on the aircraft carrier that actually moves through the steam kettaple that then accelerates at this incredible rate. The pistons, there's actually a pair of them. So there's cylinder on either side that connect to this this shuttle. The toe bar hooks in uh, and the toe bar is connected to the nose of the aircraft. Yeah, the wheels up front, and there's also something called a hold back which they fastened between the back of the wheel and the shuttle. UM. And the whole back is was it does just what it says, it holds back the jet because one of the other things you have to do, let's turn on those jet engines. Yeah, this is interesting because they do raise something that big platform behind it that raises up behind the the airplane. You can picture this. It's almost like a wall that stands up behind the plane. And what that does is it's a it's just a jet blast deflector in fact, that's what they call it. And that just doesn't allow you know, somebody get blown overboard, you know, behind them when you know you go full throttle on F A teen or whatever exactly. Yeah, So so that that launches up. And just before launch, I mean they're you know, they're checking everything. They're all they getting all the signals for the go and everything, and the pilot has to go full throttle while he's still attached to the shuttle via the toebar and the hole back is still in place. He's going full throttle and then they give the and then they finally give the the go I guess for the Shuttle to to launch. And that's what catapults the the aircraft off the end, the plane off the end of the deck. Essentially you say, release the the so that the pressure can push the pistons forward. That so the in a in a way, the you know, the plane is being towed. That's why you caught the tobar by the shuttle at an incredible speed. When it gets to the end, it can then take off and fly off into the great Blue yonder hopefully. Yeah, if everything has gone well, And this was the Shuttle technology again was pioneered by the British, and you know what, just to give you an idea how strong this is, and you get back to the British in just a second, but this is a really strong system and we're talking about steam and you might think it's not all that that forceful, but or maybe you do. I don't know, but it takes a forty five thousand pound plane from zero to one hundred and sixty five miles per hour in two seconds. Yeah that's that's faster than a Tesla two seconds. Yeah, that's considerably fast. It's not quite as fast as the top fuel dragster, which is pretty by the way, it's a it's an intense roller coaster. Uh two times I wrote that. Yeah, Oh, I wasn't even think of that. I think of the real deal, in the real the real car. And I've heard, you know, I've talked to guys that drive those top fueld directors that kind of look like long rails, you know, the real the thirty ft long ones or whatever the length is. They said, it feels like you're sitting in a stoplight and a semi hits you from behind at about two miles. That's what it feels like when those things launched. So that's got to be exactly what the pilots feel when they launch off of a deck of an aircraft carry It's it's even more exhilarating than a standard if you can call it that, a standard runway takeoff because they have so much greater distance and a much greater amount of time to be able to get up to speed, greater margin of area to suppose. Uh, speaking of margin of error is something that uh, you have you have very low margin of error is landing on an aircraft carry Oh yeah, okay. That's another really interesting aspect of this whole thing is that you know, and it took him a couple of months to figure out initially, remember, oh yeah, they were thinking about it. But it's become even more complex with jets. Yeah. So, Uh. The idea of the method that the main method is used to stop aircraft, to help aircraft come to a stop when they land on an aircraft carrier dates back to the propeller plane days, but it has become increasingly important in the jet world. As you were pointing out, Scott, Uh, and it's using a tailhook. The tailhook is just what it sounds like. You have the tail of your aircraft. There is a hook that descends down that can hook onto something. In this case, we're talking about arresting wires. These are very thick cables that stretch across the width of the landing area of the flight deck, and your goal as a pilot is to hit a specific arresting people there there. In older ships there's series of four, and more modern ones there are only three. So with the older ships you were told to hit the third one. Now, isn't this strange? Now, this is the first time that I had ever heard this when I was reading this article. This is the house stuff Works article that we're looking at here. The goal is to hit the third wire in the set, and it's the safest, most effective wire to hit. Now I was thinking, why, why is it any worse than I can understand maybe not wanting to hit the first one because it's too close to the edge and get that. And the last one is kind of a you better hit it or else you're going over the edge. Um, But why not the second or the third? I guess the third just shows some kind of precision. Yeah. Well, and and if you were able to consistently hit that third one, it would show that you were a particularly skilled pilot, and thus you would rise up the ranks more quickly because you were showing that you had the precision, the skill, and the concern necessary to continue in this If you were not consistently hitting it, you might not be flying that much longer. Yeah, I think that's what it's all about, though, I think it's I think it's all about, you know, just being able to have uh navy bragging rights. You can hit the third wire every single time. What do you think maybe maybe in the more current ones, the more modern ones, where there's only three wires, you're supposed to hit the second one, So again you're aiming for the one the middle one, not the one on either end. Uh. Yeah. And so what these wires do is they're actually connected to giant hydraulic systems, and so when the the aircraft hooks one of the wires, it obviously starts to pull on that wire. The hydraulics act as sort of a breaking mechanism. Now, when you watch one of these aircraft land, it looks like it stops almost immediately. What's actually happening is that it's not just a tot wire that's attached to like anchored down to two stationary points, because that would very likely cause damage to the aircraft or to the aircraft carrier both and it could the person the human beings. It's tough to stop immediately. Yeah, And there's lots of footage, tragic footage of aircraft that were unable to stop, uh, including ones where they had not yet started using arresting wires. And you see, uh like there's I saw one where it not only did skid continuously down the landing strip, it collided with aircraft that were further down. The aircraft carrier you're talking about prop planes, Yeah, super dangerous uh stuff. In fact, um, there's a there's an article I read called several Reasons Why Aircraft Carriers are Super Dangerous by Sam Lagron, who worked in the Naval Institute, and uh, he talked about how how how precise you had to be, how closely these things could uh come between, you know, success and failure, and it's pretty terrifying. It actually mentions that, uh that if you were flying some of the larger aircraft like the Navy's E two Hawkeye, Let's say that you don't hit that third cave, when you don't hit the fourth cable, what you have to do then is you have to throttle up full speed so that you can fly up and then come back around and try again. Can I tell you something I think that even if you hit that third wire, or you hit the second wire, the first wire, I think, you still go full throttle. Um. This is which is so weird because you would think that, Okay, it's it's snagged, it's it's secure, But they don't know that yet. They don't know if it's gonna skip over it, if it's gonna if it's got a tenuous grasp on itt that you know it's gonna let go. Um. So they're they're trained that when that contact is made, even though you feel a grab, you still go full throttle, just for a brief second, just in case, because that's your last chance. Otherwise, if you're going over the edge slow, you better hit the ejector because that's your only way out because these otherwise you're going in the train. Yeah, and it always ends up upside down. Yeah. So uh, you know the the the standard procedure is that you need to take off again. It's called you know, you're you have to be you have to be a bolter. You have to bolt a bolter. Yeah, they're calling bolters where you you end up having to take back off again. Well, here's the thing. Depending on the size of the aircraft, you might not have a very large margin of error. For example, the Navy's E two Hawkeye, the width margin of error can be a foot twelve inches of whether like, you have that twelve inches of space to throttle up before you are not going to be fast enough to get take off again and if it again, yeah, twelve and well, I mean it is incredible. You think about the amazing uh skill and encourage it takes to handle this kind of aircraft. We'll be back with more about aircraft carriers in just a moment. Imagine that you've got like a two by four, all right, and then you've got a ruler, so that's not as wide as your two bike board, and you lay the ruler down and the ruler represents the landings drip on your aircraft carrier knee. The two by four itself is just barely longer than the ruler. Uh. And and so those were the early aircraft carriers, right. You had just kind of a straight strip that was where you would land and take off, and it will also be where you're you would be mustering your aircraft. Uh. Which means that there were a lot of potential places where you could have collisions if things did not go. Well, the British came up with a brilliant way of getting around this. They decided to tilt the landing strip by fourteen degrees so that it was not a you know, it didn't go the length of the ship. And by tilt, I don't mean that it was tilted on uh like, it wasn't like a cantid surface. No, it was just it was just instead of it being a straight road, imagine that you just turn that off the line of the keel exactly. So that meant that you could you could have a mustering area for aircraft that was not directly in the path of where aircraft were landing. The British were the ones who came up with that. The British were the ones that came up with the arresting wires, and then the United States and other nations said, this is a really good idea that we are going to also employ. Yeah, yeah, ways of making something that is no matter how you slice it, incredibly dangerous less. So you know, there's some that even have a almost like I think they call a ski jump at the end. It looks like a ramp. It ramps up at the end so that you get just that little bit more of a lift at the end, I suppose puts you in the right direction, I would imagine. So yeah, yeah, and I've also seen ones like you know, they had other methods of trying to uh capture aircraft that might not have um have hit the arresting wires just right, including things like giant nets that would help slow down aircraft, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. It seems like that would bring its own problems. Yeah, to illustrate how dangerous this is again, going back to that several reasons article I mentioned, um lak Own quotes a statistic that really is eye opening. Between nineteen forty eight and nine, the number of US sailors and marines that died in and around aircraft carriers was eight thousand, five hundred in forty years. Eight thousand, five hundred people dying. Now that includes that includes combat, but that actually makes a much smaller number than accidents. Kidding, Yeah, so okay, I can I can mention a couple of accidents if you want me to chuck about them. All right. So, during the nineteen sixties there was kind of a bleak time for the U. S. Navy. They suffered three fires aboard aircraft carriers in the nineteen sixties, and these you can what's interesting about this is you can go back and look at these. You can look at photographs because they were, you know, filmed in a lot of cases, UM, and they use these these disasters as training films for current military members on aircraft what what not to do and what to do because they got a little better at it here. But UM, going back to and I'll just listen these kind of quickly, but just off the coast of Vietnam in nineteen sixty six, on October the USS or riskin e UM c v A thirty four, if you're interested in that designation, the hall designation. UM. There are a couple of guys that were loading some flares into a locker below deck, and one of the flares went off and there were six hundred and fifty other flares in the locker they were loading, and the guy, I don't know if he panicked or what, but when the flare went off, he shut the door real quick. He didn't try to grab that one flare out and the result was a I think it was like a huge fire that killed something like forty four men. Forty four crew members on board. So that was there was extensive damage to the ship. UM. And then just a year later in July of nineteen sixty seven, again off the coast of Vietnam, Uh, the USS Forest All this yeah, this is now this was an accidental rocket deployment UM that slammed into a parked A four that was on the deck and then that spread to other aircraft on the deck and you know, of course bombs began to explode all over the place. On top of that, you can imagine what's going on. This is this is a thirteen hour fire that crew that killed one and thirty four crew members as a huge fire. There were there were twenty one aircraft destroyed during this one. And this one is the one that I think they uses the training film of what can go wrong. And then in nineteen nine to kind of round out the decade with another disaster here uh the U. S. S. Enterprise, you know, the first nuclear powered UM carrier had US at a terrible fire as well. UM similar to the Forest hell fire. UM, but this was a rocket that ignited and hit another aircraft and you know, due to exhaust heat I think is what set this one off. But it took four hours to extinguish that one and crew members were killed during that and fifteen aircraft were destroyed. So they had their fair share of you know, hard knocks in nineteen sixty, nineteen sixties, throughout the whole decade. And I know that you know, safety has improved over the over the decades, but there's probably still a lot of small things that happen on board apparently. I mean, if eight thousand people have died on these these are dangerous places to be, yeah, I mean, well even if like there there can be things that have nothing to do with the the flight deck or the hangar or the aircraft or any of the weaponry. Even I mean, you're just talking about a confined environment where you have several thousand people existing there, there are plenty of opportunities for accidents that you know, there's same sort of accents that you could encounter in any other environment. So the figures that I mentioned, you know, not all of those were necessarily the result of some sort of catastrophic accident like the ones we've been talking about, but it does illustrate that this is an environment that that is by its very nature dangerous. Yeah, I mean, you can fall and bump your head, you can choke on something in the yeah, exactly right, and and stuff like that, you'd fall all overboard. A friend of mine served in the Navy. He didn't serve a board an aircraft carrier, but one of the one of the descriptions he gave me, I imagined there were probably lots of bumps and bruises whenever sea's got particularly rough, because he talked about, how, uh, if you're going above or below whatever deck you're on in a ship, we call them decks. They're not floors. So if you're on a deck and you need to go up or down, you you climb what is almost a ladder the the they are sets of stairs technically, but they are so steep that it's practically a ladders at a premium exactly. And if the seas are really really rough, the world around you was moving, and he talked about how, yeah, there were times where he would start to climb and because of the way the ship would roll, he would end up being at the top of the stairs way faster than he had anticipated. Like he would take a step and then the ship would role as he was stepping, and it's kind of like when you would jump on a trampoline just right, Yeah, you suddenly end up much higher up than you expected. Um, yeah, it could be actually terrifying. I have I have one really cool story of an accident that was averted by someone who was in a different accident that was the thankfully tragedy was also averted. This guy just had the best luck. Captain Jim Lovell this. If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because you've watched Apollo thirteen. He was the commander of the Apollo thirteen space mission. He also, in nineteen fifty four was flying a mission in a McDonald F two H Banshee night fighter jet. Yeah yeah, cool jet. But he had an issue in that um there was an electrical failure on his plane and all his instruments went dead. And it's at night, and he has to find the aircraft carrier by vision, like you have to find it, like you know. He didn't have any electric electronics to tell him where anything was because the electrical failure, So he had to find the carrier the U. S. S. Shangri law. And the way he found it was he saw a luminescent trail from luminescent algae that was left in the wake of the carrier and followed it to the carrier so that he could land successful. And it's so smart. What that guy hasn't lived through or he hadn't lived through, it's pretty crazy. Yeah. So yeah, I think we've really driven it home. But yeah, dangerous location. Right. One of the things that we haven't talked about yet. It's also on the flight deck is the island. Yeah. Yeah, this is important. This is where the I guess all the radar capabilities and the satellite. Yeah, the crew of the the commanders are walking around up there, um telling people what to do. So this is this is like the tower structure that you would see on the top of an aircraft carrier. Um. It's the command center and it it's the command center for the flight deck as well as the general ship. Right, and it has uh lots of different decks to it as well. It is about a hundred fifty ft tall that's about forty six but only about twenty ft wide or six ms wide at the base of the island. That's also because you don't want to take up too much space on the flight deck. You want to have as much of that space available as possible. Uh. And this is where you have lots of different decks that have important elements to it. So at the very top you've got that array of satellite dishes, radar dishes, that kind of stuff. Below that is the primary flight control or price fly. The Navy has lots of fun names for everything, like like know when we mentioned about the arresting wires and landing in them. Yes, I watched a documentary where the guy said, yeah, they call that landing in the spaghetti when you're when you're landing in the cables, landing in the spaghetti. Good term makes sense, right, I mean it really does, And it always makes me wonder if he's just if they're just yanking our chains at that point, like what can we tell them? And they're like, they're watch they're gonna start using that. Yeah, they're kind of call landings alright, so blow the price fly if that's what they call it. Um is the bridge and that's the ship's command center. Yes, the bridge. Now this is where I am in my familiar element because I love ships. I love ships, and the bridge is that command center where the captain oversees the control of the ship. Uh. Now keep in mind that aircraft carriers typically are part of a larger group of ships that they don't they aren't traveling on their own. They have escort ships. So that you have generally speaking, several in your group. Now, a captain only commands one ship. That is, the captain's responsibility is to that ship and that ship alone. So the captain is on the bridge, um and can That's where you have your your helmsman, who is controlling the steering of the the vehicle, the aircraft carrier. You have another one, the lee helmsman, who controls the since commands down to engineering for the speed, so you know, Mr Scott, down and engineering can give it, give it or more powder? Captain was the worst Scottish accent I've ever tried. Um. You you have also the quartermaster of the watch who is keeping track of the navigation information. Uh and uh. Below that you have a deck where you have the flag bridge. That's where the admiral is. Now. The admiral is in charge of all the vessels in that group, not just the aircraft carrier. So the captain commands the aircraft carrier. The admiral has the the job of of administering for the entire group of shops, and then below the flag bridge is just a various operational centers. I mean these are these are where they monitor the deck, control and launch operations and stuff like that. I mean, let's say it's a love again. Some of the names, like the aircraft handling officers sometimes called the handler or mangler. That's a big difference between the handler and the mangler, if you ask me. My my favorite description in this how Stuff Works article, which by the way, is fantastic. I highly recommend if you're interested in this to go to how Stuff Works and look up how aircraft carriers work. My favorite description is how the aircraft handler. Their job is to track which aircraft are on the flight deck, which ones are in the hangar, which ones are out you know, have flown off um. And they do so using something called the Uiji board. Oh yes, this is like a cool toy. Yeah yeah, this is really neat. Yeah it's it's it's a transparent table that has out lines of the flight deck and the hangar deck and little cutouts that represent each aircraft. And they're to scale, so the bigger aircraft have bigger cutouts than the smaller aircraft. Well, they have to. They wouldn't know how many would fit and where they would exactly. It's at all the scale, so they know exactly how to place everything and exactly where it fits out. So I like this. I like this. I like it when things are measured and and organized like I enjoyed this. I like this procedure. It looks like it sounds to me like like it's it's it's the super coolest version of risk. Does you know you're moving? All right? I need to move these aircraft from my hangar to the flight deck, and then I move these little models from this part of the etching to that part of etching to represent that. And not only that. You look at the window and it happens in real life, A little real plane on a real ship. The best again, the best game of risk ever. Right. Uh. Then you also have the combat direction center. Obviously that would be very important whenever the ship is actively involved in combat. You've got the galley deck that's immediately below the flight deck. You've got the hanger deck, which is lower down that's where all the aircraft arts. It's actually several decks tall. It's called the hangar deck, but it's actually multiple decks tall because you have to accommodate those aircraft. By the way, do yourself a favor and get on Google images and look at a hanger hangar deck at some point. It's amazing, it really is. It's so cool the way they they position all the planes. I mean, they're all put in there exactly in precisely the right way, and this is where they move them in and out on the elevators. You have the lift systems to get them up to the flight deck. It's really it's a neat space. It's almost like, um, it's like several warehouses is what it looks like, linked together, and then they store this just an incredible arsenal of planes in there. Some of these can have like eighty or more aircraft aboard them. Yeah, how do you how do you figure out how to move around eighty aircraft without bumping into each other all the time. And they even have uh door doors that can close between different chambers. Obviously that is a safety precaution. Let's say that the aircraft carrier has entered combat. You want to be able to shut close off one version one part of the hangar bay from the others if there were an enemy attack that that pierced part of it, because you want to control the spread of fire, So you might be able to close one of those doors and save three quarters of your aircraft in the case of catastrophe, or you know, even if it were just an accident and not an act of combat, you would want that ability. And then at the back end of that, the of the hangar area is an open section at the at the very aft end of the ship, a very back end if they can open up a door and they can test jet engines off the back of the of the boat, only safe place to do it because it's open to the air. Yeah. That's uh, that's just aft of the aircraft inter Intermediate Maintenance Division or ai m D shops. That's where they would do the basic maintenance that would be needed to make sure the aircraft remain in you know, fliable condition. Uh. Yeah. And again all of this is necessary just for the basic function of the aircraft carrier as its purpose as a military vehicle. Then on top of that you have all the mess halls, the galleys, the sleeping arrangements, which are cozy at best. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode on how aircraft carriers work. As was indicated, we will be back next week with part two of this classic episode, and in the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics that should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.