#deckload

[usaac-official]

A deckload of P-38s bound for Brisbane aboard USS Copahee (CVE-12), 11 March 1943

[hariesautomoto]

perspective and overlay by HariesAutoMoto

[arun-pratap-singh]

More than 2400 kg of cocaine found after false bomb threat on MSC Lorena

More than 2400 kg of cocaine found after false bomb threat on MSC Lorena

More than 2,400 kilograms of cocaine were found on the container ship MSC Lorena, which was forced to dock in Vlissingen in late December after a bomb threat that later turned out to be false alarm. “The drugs were found in a container with a deckload of cocoa,” the Antwerp prosecutor’s office said. The bomb threat was received by Belgian police on Dec. 22, when the container ship was off the…

[nola-rolo]

300 Ton Crane Barge

Crane: 2001 Build Manitowoc 2250 Crawler 260′ of variable #44 boom 60′ of #132 Fixed Jib 5 sheave 165ton Hook block Barge: 2001 Buld ABS Loadline valid to 5/2026 180 x 54′ x 9′ 5 transverse 2 long bulkheads 2000#/sf deckloading East Coast  $2.45MM asking

[juneautek]

Soundings | Catching A Deckload Of Dreams

Soundings | Catching A Deckload Of Dreams

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2pLGfjAOZ4Ls6twRIzMD3Y?si=_vuEaeeZRJSec9gXME7PWQ This is an expansive podcast with over 30 short episodes that chronicle the adventures of Chuck Bundrant in the wilds of Alaska. The Cash Buyer episode is hilarious. These guys had wads of cash just tooling around in remote Alaskan villages. Via Spotify: The story of Chuck Bundrant and Trident Seafoods is more…

[fapangel]

What is the difference between single carrier operations and multi carrier operations? Isn't it just exactly the same thing?

Hardly. 

I’ve had several questions relating to the three aircraft carriers currently parked in the Pacific, conducting exercises close to North Korea, but this question here really neatly summarizes the general gist of all ‘of em. It’s an especially interesting question because our aircraft carriers are operating air wings of only 60 or so aircraft, due to budget cuts - despite them being designed to handle at least 100, and perhaps as many as 110, depending on what combination of aircraft are being used. Thus, two US carriers with 60 aircraft wings muster 120 aircraft... only 10-20 more than a single Nimitz is theoretically capable of mustering. 

However, aircraft carriers are far, far, far more than just floating runways - aircraft carriers are huge, floating airbases. And airbase are fucking big. Airbases aren’t just places to park planes - they also service, maintain and repair them, so they’re equipped with big machine shops and tons of specialized equipment to enable that. They also store the munitions aircraft use; hundreds and hundreds of bombs, missiles, cannon shells, etc. And fuel, of course. Airbases - like civilian airports - have their own fire departments with trained personnel and fire engines, that train specifically for the requirements of fighting aircraft fires. 

And then there’s the people that do all this shit - the service technicians, the firefighters, the ordinance techs - and then you have the people that support the operations, like air attack planners, intel officers, and other unfortunates that have to keep pilots in their goddamn chairs long enough to brief them. They need to eat, sleep, shit and shave, and that requires people to cook their food, sell them razors and even janitors to clean the bathrooms. A base has a PX store, showers, and even recreation facilities so all these people don’t go stark raving fucking mad and kill each other. Oh, speaking of, you’ll need MPs to handle things like that - basically, a big airbase is a small fucking city. 

Now say you’re President of these GREAT UNITED STATES, and you wanna fuck up some mouthy faglourde over yonder. He’s too far away from the US, so you’ll need to build a new airbase in a conveniently-located ally nation to kick his shit in with. 

All that shit above? ALL of it? Billions of dollars of equipment, thousand(s) of personnel, and a small city’s worth of buildings and concrete? You gotta build it. All of it. From scratch. Starting with a big field in a kinda sorta flat place somewhere. G’luck. 

An aircraft carrier is all of that shit, but in a huge-ass boat that you can just sail around wherever you want. And that’s why they’re so goddamned expensive, valuable and powerful - it’s far easier to sail a carrier into an area on-demand than it is to build an entire new airbase (or significantly upgrade an existing one, or civilian airport), even after you account for a carrier being more expensive per-unit of everything due to the need to cram it all into a goddamn boat. 

So with two carriers in the region, we’re basically operating the same number of aircraft as one carrier, but split between two different airfields. Twice the number of bomb handlers, service techs, machinists, system-checkers, gizmo-polishers and whizbang-whackers per aircraft. You could cram extra personnel into one carrier, but the productivity gains will be limited when nobody’s got enough room to turn around without dickslapping the clown behind them, you know? 

And then there’s just the number of runways to use. An aircraft carrier equals one whole runway. That’s it. These days you can’t just line airplanes up on the deck from the halfway point, wave a flag, and let’em zoom off all at once - you have to line’em up, hook them to the catapults, and fire them off four at a time (assuming all four fucking cats are actually working.) That takes a goodly amount of time to get a strike package airborne, and the first guys up will be guzzling fuel, so you have to launch some Superbugs five-wet for buddy-tanking top-offs, and, and, and... and then there’s recovering the motherfuckers. Which you can only do one at a time. And since carrier landings are Very Hard, some of them will have to go around, and everyone might have to wait a bit while you turn into the wind to launch some alert-five fighters off the waist cats to check out a suspicious bogey... or more damn five-wet Superbugs to tank up people too low on gas because of waiting on all these fucking shenanigans. And you gotta get all these assholes back on board to turn them around for the next strike, and that’s basically playing one of those fuckin sliding-block puzzles but with F-18s in the hangar, being towed by aircraft tractors driven by 22-year olds you wouldn’t trust with a fucking tricycle on shore. 

Air ops are hard. They are very hard. Handling the logistics of them is no easy matter. So if you can split that load between two carriers - or even better, three - you can maintain a much higher operational tempo. Say you need 40 aircraft for a strike - for one carrier, that’s pretty much every F-18 on board. It’ll take a long time to launch them, form them up, make sure everyone’s tanked up (which will take a few Superbugs out of the strike to do) and get them heading in the right direction. And it’ll take a while to recover them. And the first aircraft, being rapidly turned around, will have to wait for the aircraft that landed last to refuel and re-arm before they can sortie together again. And you’ll be interrupting this shit often to refuel your ASW helos, or because the Hawkeye has a funny sound in the engine and needs to swap off with the ready crew, or whatever the fuck. Ramirez, do fucking everything. 

But if you split that load between three carriers, it goes a LOT faster and a lot smoother. One-third the load on each ship means a three-time longer duration of avgas, munitions, and crew morale, too. 

And this is in the modern age. This also applies to WWII era operations, but in even greater degrees, because they didn’t have the angled decks that allow aircraft to land while others are taking off (the “waist cats” on the end of the angled deck, where landing aircraft won’t smack into their ass-end if they bolter.) As mentioned above, back then you could line up half the air wing on the deck and have them all take off at once - but the penalty was that lining up the other half of the air wing and launching them took a while, even if they were already prepped - you had to wait for the elevators to bring them up (30 seconds at least,) then push them into position, etc. This was/is called “deck spotting.” So unlike modern carriers - where you’re stuck with launching aircraft four at a time via the catapults, with the time it takes to hook’em up and prep the launch - the penalty of waiting for the “second half” of the strike package was much greater compared to just sending the first “deckload” off alone. So if you needed to get as many aircraft airborne as possible, launching two “deckload strikes” from two carriers would effectively put one whole carrier worth of aircraft into the air - but in a fraction of the time. 

You didn’t have air-to-air tanking back then either, so protracted landing ops would often see returning aircraft too low on gas forced to ditch near the escorts. And without the ability to launch and recover at the same time, if enemy attacks found you while you were busy recovering aircraft, you were SOL. You also had your CAP fighters rotating in and out periodically, which could interrupt landing ops (and cost you aircraft low on gas) at awkward times as well. So having one carrier dedicated to defensive air ops while others launched/recovered strikes was very important - it could also recover stray aircraft that needed to land now due to low fuel state. 

Now coordinating between multiple ships is pretty hard to do, because every ship - and their leadership, and crew - is often different. This was apparent at Midway, where the Japanese - which had been practicing multi-carrier ops for a while - were able to launch aircraft from four decks, all of them getting airborne within a few minutes of each other, and then form teams in the air with their own ship-specific squadrons merging seamlessly into larger formations, commanded by someone from a ship different than theirs, but still working together as a team. That’s not easy to do - units train together for a reason, and because of the nature of carriers, meeting up with a pilot from another carrier and forming a flight with him is like teaming up and working with another pilot stationed at another airbase, that you’ve never personally trained together with before. So your doctrine has to be great, and everyone has to be on the “same page.” You also have to train specifically for ops like this - which is exactly what our three carriers in the Pacific will soon be doing. At Midway, the less experienced crew/aircrew of Hornet fared rather worse than Enterprise and Yorktown in these regards - but the US also operated their carriers separately, which would prove to be a doctrinal/strategic error in employing multiple decks as well. 

In sum, aircraft carriers are big. They’re floating airbases, with all the connotations that come with them - including the “residency” of units attached more or less permanently to them. Employing one carrier, you could probably call “tactics.” But when you bring multiple decks into a situation, you’re automatically talking about operational-level employment. It’s a whole new scale.  

[nebris]

75 Years Ago, Today: Saturday, July 8, 1944 U.S. Navy Casablanca-class  escort carrier USS Thetis Bay (CVE-90) enroute to NAS Alameda,  California, with a deckload of war-weary planes on 8 July 1944. The  planes visible on deck are eight Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boats,  18 Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters, and a Grumman J2F Duck.

[shipwreckguy]

Photo: forum-schiff.de

The 82 meter long cargo vessel Mosvik became disabled just outside the Kiel Canal near Holtenau, Germany. The Mosvik was headed to Creeksea from Riga with a cargo of plywood when it lost stability. The Mosvik heeled over to 30 degrees to port and threaten to capsize. The 12 crew on board sent out a distress call and attempted to right the cargo vessel by dropping part of deckload of plywood.

#gallery-0-11 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-11 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 25%; } #gallery-0-11 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-11 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Photo: ndr.de

Photo: ndr.de

Photo: forum-schiff.de

Photo: forum-schiff.de

Multiple tugs along with patrol vessels, DGzRS lifeboat and a crane vessel arrived on scene. While some vessels attempted to recover the deck cargo, others assisted the Mosvik crew in stabilizing the vessel. Traffic was halted on the canal until the cargo was recovered. The operation lasted 6 hours before all the cargo was secured. The Mosvik was later escorted by a tug to Kiel. No reports of injuries, damage or pollution released.

#gallery-0-12 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-12 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-12 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-12 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Photo: forum-schiff.de

Photo: ndr.de

Photo: forum-schiff.de

Photo: forum-schiff.de

Photo: kn-online.de

Photo: ndr.de

MV Mosvik disabled by cargo shift #kiel #holtenau #germany #maritime The 82 meter long cargo vessel Mosvik became disabled just outside the Kiel Canal near Holtenau, Germany.

[uss-edsall]

Langley and her deckload, in a convoy headed for Bombay, India, from Fremantle, had been diverted by her new boss Helfrich. He felt the need for planes was so urgent that she should leave her convoy early and proceed unescorted in spite of the risk. Antisubmarine escort for the last few miles into Tjilatjap was to be provided by the destroyer USS Whipple, her bow patched after a collision with De Ruyter, and by Edsall, leaky and bent aft from having one of her own depth charges explode too close aboard. Each carried one 3-inch antiaircraft gun. The day was ideal for bombing—clear, with scattered high clouds and a light breeze. Just before noon, 75 miles from Tjilatjap, nine 2-engined planes attacked the Langley. The first two glide bombing runs missed, but the third scored five hits and two nears. Soon, Langley’s deckload of aircraft was burning fiercely. The ship took a heavy list. Power failed and the pumps stopped. All but sixteen of the men aboard were rescued by the two destroyers, who then sent the old girl to the bottom with gunfire and torpedoes. There was some talk in Glassford’s headquarters that she might have been saved had the situation been better handled, but this is doubtful. At that grim moment, the Lanikai was not more than 20 miles away.

Cruise of the Lanikai, by Kemp Tolley

[siliquasquama]

Taffy 3 and Hatsuzuki

In the history of naval warfare, two battles stand alone, one whose fame has been sung for nearly a century, the other whose name is nearly unknown. I think of one when I think of the other, for both happened on the same day, in the same archipelago, between the same navies, for similar reasons, with similar results, resulting from similar ferocity on the part of each, such that their opponents mistook them for ships far beyond their true size.

One is the US Navy 7th Fleet Task Force 77.4.3, more often known by the name "Taffy 3." A comparatively small force, just a few destroyers, destroyer escorts, and escort carriers, each designed mostly to fight submarines, repurposed to fight ground troops, and yet -- when it came time to do battle it was not with submarines nor ground troops. It was against the Center Force of the Imperial Japanese Navy, an assembly of the largest and most powerful battleships ever made, each of which outweighed any ship in Taffy 3, one of which outweighed all of Taffy 3 combined. Each cannon of the battleship Yamamoto weighed as much as the destroyers arrayed against her. Alongside her sailed three other battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and eleven destroyers.

And they were sailing to intercept a group of troop transports, an entire division of U.S. Marines, none of whom would have survived if Center Force found them, for Admiral Halsey, the commander of the U.S. fleet, had taken his ships chasing after shadows. So, it was up to Taffy 3, and Taffy 3 alone, to stand in the way.

The valiance and sheer audacity of their defense, along with compounding errors on the part of the Japanese admiral, and Center Force's inability to respond to air attacks, led the Japanese fleet to turn away from a force that, by all logic, by all sense, by every war game one could play, should have been little more than a tin can against a tank. But for the captains of Taffy 3 there was no sense, only desperation, grim resolve and wild fury. The little escort force made it abundantly clear just why the name berserker still rings through the ages, why it still sends shivers down the spine. For one who fights without retreat, and without thought of surrender, is the most terrifying opponent possible. 

And for all that the destroyers were sunk, their engines in pieces and their sailors slain -- they won. They gave everything they had to save the troop transports and it was enough. Kurita turned his fleet away. It has been called the most lopsided battle in the history of naval warfare. Perhaps the most lopsided victory in all of human history, though some would hold Simö Hayha's Winter War service up to the same level.

The difference being that Hayha was only hit once, whereas the ships of Taffy 3 were hit many times by shells that should have sunk them in an instant, and they never stopped fighting, not until the very end. Captain Evans shouted orders down to the men handling the rudder when his bridge was out of commission. Paul H. Carr died at his post with one unfired round still in hand.. Fighter pilots ran at the enemy ships with machine gun fire, with depth charges, with rockets, with handguns, with nothing at all but dry runs. Everyone gave everything they could, and it was enough.

The tin can stopped the tank.

Admiral Sprague’s record of the battle includes a quotation from an unnamed signal officer near him, which stands in perfect summation of the spirit of Taffy 3. In the context of the battle, the quotation stands as the most audacious epigram in the history of warfare, for upon seeing the retreat of the Japanese fleet, the sailor shouted:

Damn it, boys, they’re getting away!

That was the spirit that defeated Admiral Kurita.

...

There is another ship amidst the battles of Leyte Gulf that day, who matched Taffy 3 in spirit and in sacrifice, if not in renown.

To the level of Taffy 3 I will hold a ship few if any remember, whose commander left no words we remember, whose crew left no words the Anglosphere has ever recorded. To the level of Taffy 3 I will hold the destroyer Hatsuzuki.

Of the Northern Force that met Halsey’s fleet in battle up near Cape Engaño, there were survivors. Perhaps few more than the 2360 loaded onto ships that Hatsuzuki escorted. But whatever ship did hold survivors, it could not risk these passengers in open battle, not when the decks were crowded with non-combatants. For the group that Hatsuzuki was escorting, only she could meet the pursuit of the enemy ships head-on. She had loaded the fewest survivors; she had her decks clear; she had her guns ready.

And so she met her enemies.

She did not turn aside her opponent, only delayed them. She did not save the fortunes of her navy, only the lives of a few soldiers. And yet -- in her own victory that day, she stands with Taffy 3.

I say victory. For she was ONE ship, one lone destroyer, without air cover, without an opponent as timid as Admiral Kurita. She stood alone, against many US cruisers and destroyers, buying time for the rest of her group to get away. For two hours she stood alone, and held off an opponent that outweighed her and outgunned her as much as the Yamato outweighed Taffy 3. For two hours she held, for the sake of the survivors, lest they perish after they thought they were saved.

Two hours were all she could give, before she fell. But those hours were enough.

There is very little we know of the battle itself, other than that it was a “very stubborn fight”; if I were to say what the crew of the Hatsuzuki felt, and what their captain said, it would be speculation, unless by some miracle the accounts of the few survivors are preserved in Japanese texts, somewhere. Therefore I can only speak of what we do know -- but what we do know, and what we may know, is enough to venture some speculation.

What we do know: for two hours she held the line against many foes, and, just as Taffy 3 was mistaken for an entire fleet, she was mistaken many times for a heavy cruiser.

As for what we may know -- I will admit that ModelShipwrights.com is hardly an authoritative source, especially when the passage in question cites no sources. Yet it is the only online source I have been able to find with an actual description of Hatsuzuki’s last stand. As follows:

As Hatsuzuki was rescuing the survivors along with sister destroyer Wakasuki and the smaller Kuwa, the group was surprised by a U.S. force of four cruisers and three destroyers...Captain Amano Shigetaka detached Hatsuzuki to attack the U.S. force to cover the escape of Wakasuki and Kuwa. In a two hour running battle the fast, agile ship made repeated real and feint torpedo attacks and fired her guns continuously, managing to straddle the cruiser Santa Fe and shower the Wichita with splinters. More importantly, these all-out attacks distracted the U.S. force as Wakasuki and Kuwa withdrew. The destroyer put up such a fight that American observers identified the ship variously as an Aoba-class heavy cruiser or an Agano-class light cruiser – but the end was inevitable. The lone ship was, in the words of a USN battle report, “literally punched to pieces” under the combined firepower of four cruisers and three destroyers. All aboard Hatsuzuki, including the Destroyer Division Commander, perished. Nevertheless, the sacrifice enabled Wakasuki and Kuwa with their deckloads of survivors as well as the light cruiser Isuzu (which had been assisting the sinking carrier Chiyoda), to escape.

This account does not square precisely with Wikipedia’s description, which has the opposing force as 13 ships rather than seven. But, either way, it is clear that the Hatsuzuki went down fighting hard. If I am to believe the details of this this report, then I can believe that Captain Shigetaka had the same steely resolve as Captain Evans, and that Hatsuzuki’s crew had the same tenacity as that of the USS Johnston. I should think they would need both to stand against so many foes, whether seven or thirteen.

The detail that shines through all accounts is what connects her so closely to Taffy 3: that she fought so boldly as to make her appearance far outweigh her physical substance in the eyes of her enemy.

It is not easy for an experienced sailor to mistake a destroyer for a heavy cruiser; the former tops out at far less than half the tonnage of the latter. Even in her single photograph, she does not appear large or imposing, compared to a cruiser.

I daresay that her crew made up for the difference by spending everything they had. I daresay that she, like Taffy 3, earned the title of Berserker, in her desperate battle to save the survivors of Engaño. For the sake of those survivors, she was a roaring tiger where her foes thought they had met a mouse.

I consider what navies, what armies, what cavalries have done the same. A few come to mind. We forget sometimes that the Greek armies held Thermopylae against the Persians to give the people of Athens more time to escape. Likewise the combined 9th and 12th armies of the Wehrmacht stood against the advancing Soviets to buy as much time for fleeing refugees as they could. In the Pacific War, the destroyer Akikaze deliberately took the blow of a salvo of torpedos heading towards an escort carrier, and was lost with all hands. From our own time there are a fair few individuals who have done the same -- those lone people who, in the ongoing war of the far-right wing against the idea of a peaceful society, stood up to mass shooters and held them off long enough for others to escape.

I wonder how many such examples have been lost to memory. On that I can only speculate -- that as the defenseless are menaced, so there are always those willing to stand in their defense? Many times I think human beings are eager for it. Perhaps too eager, too eager to die as an easy path, rather than live for people as the harder path -- tempting to die and escape, rather than live and suffer. Yet there are times when one can only die for others or run away, and while some will run, others will hold the line as long as they can, whether or not they will be remembered. As if by instinct, rather than deliberation.

No one had to convince the crews of Taffy 3 and Hatsuzuki to do this. No one had to whip them forward, no one had to promise them heavenly reward or hellish punishment. All they needed was to know that there were people in the line of fire who could not fire back and would be fired upon, if someone did not stand in the way. All they needed to know was that they were the only people close enough to be that someone. And they knew that they would die in this defense.

And every one of them said:

What are we waiting for?

...

I will speak of Hatsuzuki and Taffy 3 as equals, in the same breath, rarely to mention one without the other. And if anyone should ask why, I say:

They stood alone in defense of the the defenseless.

And that answer should be enough.

[usaac-official]

USS Mission Bay (CVE-59) transports a deckload of partially disassembled P-47s from New York to Casablanca, 31 May 1944

[fapangel]

Honestly, I think you missed something important in your discussion of enclosed hangars. The ability to warm up your aircraft's engine inside the hangar instead of only once you're on the flightdeck. This has significant ramifications on sortie generation rate, and thus overall size of any given strike package.

You’re right, I did forget that. It gave American carriers the ability to launch their entire aircraft complement in one go, much more effectively than the Japanese could, at least. In Shattered Sword it’s noted that an American carrier in prewar exercises did this at least once, in “one deck cycle.” I should probably ask Lundstrom et al. what that meant - launching the first deckload, and spotting the second deckload in one spotting cycle? Or were they able to spot all of them on the deck? The latter hardly seems possible, but the wording was unclear. 

[nebris]

A deckload of U.S. Army Air Force Republic P-47N Thunderbolt fighters on the flight deck of USS Casablanca (CVE-55), 16 July 1945. The planes were loaded at Naval Air Station Alameda, California and were bound for Guam.

[usaac-official]

USS Langley (AV-3) underway with a deckload of P2Y floatplanes, bound from Pearl Harbor to the mainland.  Note the removed wings stacked at the rear of the flight deck

[juneautek]

via Twitter https://twitter.com/JuneauTek

[juneautek]

via Twitter https://twitter.com/JuneauTek