So they usually keep the bulk of the aircraft inside the ship? Man, must be a pain getting ready to make a port call.
Some of the planes are on the hanger Deck {the one where you can see through the ship if the doors are open or 4 decks down from flight deck}. The rest are on the flight deck. You have to have a place to send them too if you send them out when coming in. In the US when were are pulling back into home port the planes fly off the night before or the morning of our returning to port. They want them off before we hit the channel due to draft and ballast reasons. The planes fly back to their home base like Oceana, Jacksonville, etc. As soon as we tie up we loose about 50% of the persons onboard {the airwing} as they offload and go back to their squadron bases. They leave ship before any liberty occurs.
The Navy has the port call system down pat as far as foreign ports go. Very organized and somewhat efficient. Each carrier has 6-50' utility boats and 1-35' utility boat or UB for enlisted transport. The 50' can haul about 175 persons at a time. They also have 2- 35' officers boats {PB} which have two cabins, the Captains Gig a 35' and the Admirals Barge as they called it another 35' PB. The Captains Gig and Admirals have twin inboards and can flat get up and haul. The other boats when I was in had Detroit 671 engines.
Before I made NCO I was assigned to work as an engineman on the three man crew that run each one of them when in a foreign port. We ran in 24/48 shifts. The close calls I had while in were mainly on boat crew except for one in a fire on the ship. In general our runs were 20-45 minutes from ship to what we called Fleet Landing on shore.