What If the U.S. Navy Revived Flying Aircraft Carriers?

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By David Axe,The National Interest

The U.S. Navy should consider reviving a concept that died a catastrophic death in the 1930s, one journalist recommended in the pages of Proceedings, the professional journal of the U.S. Naval Institute.

This first appeared in September 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Kyle Mizokami argued that the American fleet should look into large airships as carriers for unmanned aerial vehicles, in essence updating the fleet’s costly experimentation with Akron-class airships more than 80 years ago. Airships could complement multi-billion-dollar aircraft carriers.

“The necessary technology already exists for unmanned airships to team up with UAVs to provide modern-day equivalents of the Akron-class airships,” Mizokami wrote.

The Navy on its official website describes the brief service of the two Akrons, which at 785 feet long could cruise at 50 knots over a distance of thousands of miles while carrying 89 crew, seven machine guns and four fighter aircraft that launched and landed via a complex trapeze device.