Can an aircraft carrier handle any kind of seas?

[Cluricaun]

If you’ve never seen a carrier in person, they’re breathtaking. They literally look like a skyscraper topped with blacktop floating in the sea. Just based on that size alone, I’d think that an aircraft carrier could handle some pretty rough weather, but could one sail through say a hurricane? Is there ocean conditions out there that could swamp a carrier? Or could one set through any kind of weather? I'd imagine a carrier group on deployment manages to see some pretty rough weather in their 90 day floats, but is there ever a time where the Commander says "Hey fuck this, let's turn around and get out of here."?

[What Exit?]

From experience, a US Aircraft Carrier can ride through most things. We rode through a Monsoon in the Sea of Japan. We took 7° lists which was huge for a Carrier. I would think if a large wave, hit the Carrier just right from the side there could be a real problem, but with modern equipment I cannot conceive of a truly large wave coming in before the Carrier could turn into the wave and thus be find. No normal weather is going to seriously affect a Carrier at sea. In port is another issue. Carrier will actually do emergency pullouts at times if really bad weather is expected. I guess this has always been a big advantage of San Diego and San Francisco as Carrier ports, the weather is never extreme enough to worry. I know it was an issue at times in the Philippines and imagine it may have been at Norfolk Virginia, Japan and even Pearl.

Back to the monsoon I rode out on the USS Ranger. We prepared for the storm by tying down everything, or at least trying to. We were so unused to such motion and Carriers’ have shallow bunks and flat cafeteria style tables that on the first big wave to hit us, every bottle of ketchup went sliding off the tables and many broke. Also many men rolled out of the racks (bunks). The problem is that navy racks on the USS Ranger and most ships are stacked 3 high. If you fell out of a top rack, it hurt, it could hurt a lot.

We did pretty well though, no aircraft or munitions moved and no large objects went down that I recall. I do not recall any reports of broken bones. Seas sickness was way up, especially for those that worked up above the flight deck in the Bridge. As someone that worked around the water level the 7° lists were not so bad, but this is very magnified when you are 50+ feet higher up.

So the Carrier did OK, we rode through the monsoon. At one point I went to the fantail, (rear of the boat, hangar bay level open to the air) to get some fresh air and take a look. I saw one of our escorts bouncing through the waves we plowed through. It looked horrible. I understand it was horrible. Some of our destroyers, I believe the Spruance class specifically could not handle the really heavy weather well. These destroyers ended up top heavy when final changes were made to them. I am not sure what class out escorts were, but it looked like hell.

[Sarahfeena]

What happens if there are planes sitting on the carrier when it pitches that much?

[Cluricaun]

I'm going to guess that when the radar sees a storm coming they put the planes below pretty quickly and lash them down, but Jim will know better than I would.

[Sarahfeena]

I'm pretty dense...I wasn't thinking that they obviously have some place to store the planes below deck. :

ETA: Which of course doesn't mean that the planes wouldn't get damaged, but of course they have some way to tie them up, too. : :

[What Exit?]

What happens if there are planes sitting on the carrier when it pitches that much?

I'm going to guess that when the radar sees a storm coming they put the planes below pretty quickly and lash them down, but Jim will know better than I would.

In case of any storm, they do tend to store as much as possible down below, but the tie down points and chains used on the flight deck when secured can handle more than most storms can dish out.

For the monsoon, the flight deck was cleared as far as I can recall. I never saw the hangar bay more full. I am also under the impression some of the aircraft flew ahead to land on land and ease crowding. I am not sure of this though. I was never near the flight deck and we flew no planes that day and night.

Under fairly calm conditions they did royally screw up once. A copter was on the elevator (huge external lift from the hangar bay to flight deck) and not chocked down or chained down. Someone was being really lazy and careless. Sure enough a large wave sent us rolling and the copter slid into the sea and sank. Now I would guess the idiot in charge had done this lazy routine a hundred times before without a problem but most repetitive actions on a Navy Ship have a written an laminate Standard Operating Procedure and in failing to follow it he cost the Ranger, the Navy and US taxpayers a lot of money and himself a stripe and a large fine.

[Sarahfeena]

Holy shit. Sounds like there's a good chance someone could get killed that way, too. Sort of comforting in a way to me, though...I've made mistakes in my time, but I've never sunk a helicopter!

[What Exit?]

Holy shit. Sounds like there's a good chance someone could get killed that way, too. Sort of comforting in a way to me, though...I've made mistakes in my time, but I've never sunk a helicopter!

Someone could have, we had much more complicated mistakes cost men lives. A pilot blew a landing, missed the arresting gear with his hook and failed to pull back up and plunged himself and his jet to the bottom of the ocean. He never had a chance to get out. He had to do a lot wrong in a very short amount of time to do this.

Before I got on board, there was a series of errors that led to a main machine space (one of the 4 primary engine rooms) to go on fire.
* There was oil in the bilge and it was not cleaned up in a timely manner.
* There were rags improperly stowed
* Someone was probably smoking where they should not have been though it may have been an oily rag that went up due to heat but butts were found
* The fire training was not up to snuff
* Evacuation of the space and verification of the evacuation failed several were cut off from escape.
* Two men tried to fight an oil based fire with water (the ignorant fools died)
* When the fire was beaten down with an automatic suppression system a first class or chief authorized opening a door too soon and the fire reflashed.
* A few died doing everything right trying to suppress the fire.
* In all 7 young men died, none over the age of 25.

It took a lot of things to go wrong and to be done wrong for that disaster.

We had a numnuts reservist light his bunk up at night as he was smoking in his rack and fell asleep. He lived but he was drummed out of the Navy and seriously injured.

Sadly etc.

[Cluricaun]

Holy shit. Sounds like there's a good chance someone could get killed that way, too. Sort of comforting in a way to me, though...I've made mistakes in my time, but I've never sunk a helicopter!

Yeah, no kidding. I'd be tempted to jump in after it just in an effort to save my sorry carcass.

[OtakuLoki]

I don't have much time, now, but one of the more devastating events that the US Pacific Fleet went through during WWII was a typhoon. IIRC while many of the birdfarms were tossed all over, none of them were sunk.

At least two Destroyer Escorts, however, did sink. And the damages throughout the fleet were almost as bad as after several of the battles that had been fought. I'll check things out when I get back later this afternoon.

[What Exit?]

I don't have much time, now, but one of the more devastating events that the US Pacific Fleet went through during WWII was a typhoon. IIRC while many of the birdfarms were tossed all over, none of them were sunk.

At least two Destroyer Escorts, however, did sink. And the damages throughout the fleet were almost as bad as after several of the battles that had been fought. I'll check things out when I get back later this afternoon.

Keep in mind those were older, lower, smaller carriers. Not the Super Carriers from the 50s on. Today's carrier except for one are even larger and bigger and more sea worthy. The Kitty Hawk is the of the older Super Carriers. The Enterprise which is effectively modern is the next oldest.

Details of the incident Loki spoke of: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq102-4b.htm

[Jaglavak]

A modern ship derives stability from it's shape. Basically when the ship rolls, it's center of buoyancy moves toward the down side due to the additonal hull volume getting stuffed under water. This generates a righting moment as the distance between the center of buoyancy and the center of mass move apart. It may not look like it, but generally the maximum righting moment happens just as the lee scupper goes under.

I did a few rough calculations based on the dimensions of a supercarrier. I figure it would take about a 300 MPH breeze to knock one over. I don't have time right now to do a wave estimate but I'm guessing the answer will be 'really big'.

[What Exit?]

A modern ship derives stability from it's shape. Basically when the ship rolls, it's center of buoyancy moves toward the down side due to the additonal hull volume getting stuffed under water. This generates a righting moment as the distance between the center of buoyancy and the center of mass move apart. It may not look like it, but generally the maximum righting moment happens just as the lee scupper goes under.

I did a few rough calculations based on the dimensions of a supercarrier. I figure it would take about a 300 MPH breeze to knock one over. I don't have time right now to do a wave estimate but I'm guessing the answer will be 'really big'.

My non-scientific guess was along these lines. If the USS Nimitz just happened to be fairly near the Canary Islands when one of them collapsed and the resulting super-wave caught the Nimitz broadsides it would probably capsize the Nimitz. However in that case the Nimitz going down would probably be the least concern to the World. I am talking about an incredible disaster.

I don't believe even a very strong sea quake could generate a wave large enough and fast enough to capsize a modern Super Carrier.

[OtakuLoki]

Keep in mind those were older, lower, smaller carriers. Not the Super Carriers from the 50s on. Today's carrier except for one are even larger and bigger and more sea worthy. The Kitty Hawk is the of the older Super Carriers. The Enterprise which is effectively modern is the next oldest.

Details of the incident Loki spoke of: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq102-4b.htm

Thanks for the link, What Exit?.


I didn't mean to draw an equivalence between the Fleet Carriers of the day and the modern Super Carriers. As you rightly point out, they are hugely different critters. A WWII Essex class ship was about 36,500 tonnes displacement with a full load. A Kitty Hawk class ship displaces over 80,000 tonnes fully loaded. Nimitz, and the forthcoming Ford, class ships are even larger.

Size isn't everything, of course, but it can act as a rough measure of the pounding a given vessel can take from environmental conditions. And assuming the architects did their jobs right. (If the calculations are FUBARed, I'm not getting aboard the ship even if the sea is as smooth as a millpond. I remember the the M/V Eastland, I do!

One of the reasons that I mentioned that WWII typhoon is that the conditions that caused it to be such a disaster would not be replicated today. Weather forecasting and monitoring that we all take for granted today was impossible in 1944. Today the Navy does steer ships from the very worst of the weather systems they're likely to encounter, while Task Force 38 actually ran through the center of the typhoon they encountered. Without a pressing military reason to accept that kind of punishment a modern force would avoid the worst of such a storm.

Which can still be pretty bad. I was aboard USS Virginia during the 1993 Storm of the Century in the Atlantic. We were doing 30 degree rolls, with seas being reported from the bridge having swells as high as 70 or 80 feet high - crashing against the bridge or down onto the foredeck. It was a punishing regimen, and the crew was about 30% incapacitated with sea sickness.

Having said that, we had several sailors aboard who had come over from carriers. All of them agreed that the bird farms would have felt the weather we were in, but not to the same extent. One of them pointed out that the worst part of being aboard a carrier in such heavy seas states was how your inner ear and your eyes would be reporting such varying states. AIUI, aboard a Nimitz class ship, there are passageways that run nearly the length of the ship from close to the bow almost to the stern. You'd have people in the aft end of the passageway, looking forward, leaning off to port, because that's how that section of the ship was being pushed by the waves. Then several hundred feet forward, you'd be looking at other sailors, leaning to starboard, because that's how that section of the ship was tilted! The vertigo that gave was enough to affect some people who were susceptible to sea-sickness.

So, in practice, I don't believe that an aircraft carrier is going to be facing any seas that it cannot handle.

It is important to remember that sea action can eventually destroy anything. We'd be talking corner cases, like the megadisaster What Exit? mentioned in post #13, or a storm such as The Great Storm of 1703 (Infamous for utterly destroying the first Eddystone Lighthouse, and causing windmills to burn up because they were being turned so quickly.) to create the conditions required.

Fire, on the other hand, has come a lot closer than many people like to think about to taking out several supercarriers. IIRC the Forest Fire was so flooded during the firefighting efforts off Vietnam, she took on a 15-20 degree list. Remember what What Exit? said it took to make Ranger rock 7-10 degrees, and think about the forces involved there. For an example of what could happen if such uncontrolled flooding were left unabated, read about the S.S. Normandie, which capsized in NY harbor due to "over-enthusiastic firefighting efforts*." Once a ship loses stability like that, things go very bad very quickly.







*Some people have raised the theory that the original fire, or the botched fire fighting efforts, were the work of the dockside mafia, trying to prove that they had to be bought off to let the war effort continue. IMNSHO the most that can be said is that it remains "not proved." It fits very well with the MO of those groups at the time, and is a good barometer for why Lucky Luciano may have deserved the medal that some Congresspersons wanted to issue him after the end of the war.

[Jaglavak]

Interesting linkies:

Intact Stability Code

Rogue Waves

[Exy]

Wow, this thread is awesome, thanks, you guys!

[Elendil's Heir]

Yes, indeed! Thanks for the stories, What Exit?

Wiki on "Halsey's Typhoon" in 1944. Check out the picture of USS Cowpens heeling over: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halsey%27s_Typhoon

And more on rogue waves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_waves

A rogue wave is shown in the movie Poseidon, hitting a big passenger liner. The movie's not that good, but the wave scenes are awesome.