Flying Aircraft Carriers

[+MigBuster]

 

 

 

 

Flying aircraft carriers sound like fantasy, something you’d only see in a crappy Marvel movie. But they’re real. Or rather, were real. In the 1930s, the United States made two plane-carrying airships. This video has the remains of one, the USS Macon, lying at the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

The Macon and her sister ship, the USS Akron, were huge vessels, less than 20 feet shorter than the ill-fated, hydrogen-filled Hindenburg. But the Macon and the Akron were inherently safer, borne aloft by less-flammable helium, and propelled by eight 12-cylinder Maybach engines. The engines themselves could rotate downwards and backwards, enabling a modicum of thrust-vectoring control.

 

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/gaze-upon-the-ghostly-remains-of-the-last-airborne-airc-1725717826

[Skyviper]

 Yeah I remember seeing some footage of this in action. Crazy cool stuff they did.

[abuassad]

Wasn't there a movie with this scenario?

[B52STRATO]

Wasn't there a movie with this scenario?

 

Could it be "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" ? Still haven't see it but a friend tolds me about a battle with Zeppelin and a flying aircraft carrier.

[+Fubar512]

I have fished on the wreck site of the Akron.   Enough remains of it to provide some cover smaller fishes and lobster, which in turn attracts larger prey species and predators to the area. 

[Capitaine Vengeur]

There were such German flying aircraft carriers in Herbert G. Wells' "The War in the air" (1908). Actually, if I remember well, it was because the German planes were too archaic, heavy and underpowered to take off, and had to be dropped from an airship to gain initial speed. I don't remember there were such beasts at Jules Verne, and yet he was an imaginative guy regarding balloons.