Nearly 30 years ago, USS Forrestall (CV-59), now razor blades, deployed to the Persian Gulf with nearly 90 planes aboard. Just sayin’. At least our good friends the French have the stones to DO SOMETHING now, as opposed to The Won.
Sure, US supercarriers used to deploy with 90-aircraft airwings.
But how many of those aircraft were maintenance hogs that spent a LOT of time in the hangar being fixed? I read somewhere that the F/A-18E/Fs have much lower maintence requirements than the F-14s did. The F-14 was a better all around plane in terms of performance, but had only something like 1/2 the sortie rate of the SuperBug.
IIRC it used to be that carrier squadrons took a plane or two each along on deployments as “hangar queens” that would sit in the hangar and be cannibalized for parts to keep the other ones flying. The F-14D in the Smithsonian (VF-31 Iraqi Freedom veteran, among other things) was just such a plane: it still has a campaign ribbon painted on it’s nose that reads “I Gave So Others Could Fly” ...