Replies

Yes, it has a hangar deck. ;-)

Given PGMs and standoff weapons an airwing with 26 strike aircraft (the rest being support: E-2s and helos) is fairly potent. Remember that the key number isn’t actually raw number of aircraft, but rather how many sorties the carrier can generate during the course of operations. There’s a point of diminishing returns where having more aircraft aboard lowers the number of possible sorties.

There is also an issue with small decks which limit how many aircraft you can recover in one cycle. Look at the picture of the ship above. The dashed line on the starboard side of the landing area is the "foul line." You have to have that entire area clear in order to recover the next aircraft. Now look at the bow. That is the only rapidly accessible area for parking upon recovery. This ship is extremely limited because the foul line goes up a large portion of the port side of bow, and the bow in front of the island is very short. You can probably only catch 7 or 8 planes max without stopping the recovery and packing aircraft behind the island.

In contrast an American carrier can recover 20-25 aircraft in a single reccovery sending them all out of the landing area, through dearming and then to the bow. In the daytime that is one aircraft every 35-45 seconds. At night, one per minute.