The Ship Model Forum

From the late 60's until the mid 90's, a typical airwing would have:
VF Sqdn F-4/F-14 12 Aircraft Side number 100-1xx
VF Sqdn F-4/F-14 12 Aircraft Side number 200-2xx
VA/VFA A-7/FA-18 12 Aircraft Side number 300-3xx
VA/VFA A-7/FA-18 12 Aircraft Side number 400-4xx
VA A-6/KA-6 12-15 Aircraft( 12 A-6E/3 KA-6D) Side number 500-5xx
VS S-3 70's & 80's 10 Aircraft; 90's 6 Aircraft Side number 700-7xx
VAQ EA-6B 4 Aircraft ( early 90's a few airwings had 5) Side number 620-62x
VAW E-2 4 Aircraft ( early 90's a few airwings had 5) Side number 600-60x
HS SH-3/SH-60 6-8 Helo's Side number 610-61x
VAQ EA-3/ES-3 1 or 2 aircraft side numbers varied.

The number of aircraft might vary a little depending on wether there was a mishap or a squadron just did not get a full set of planes. Towards the late 80's and early 90's, the navy did not have enough planes to deploy the airwing I described above. Towards the late 90's, VF & VFA squadrons starting deploying with 10 aircraft because of aircraft shortages.

A new airwing would have,
VFA FA-18 10 Aircraft Side number 100-1xx
VFA FA-18 10 Aircraft Side number 200-2xx
VFA FA-18 10 Aircraft Side number 300-3xx
VFA FA-18 10 Aircraft Side number 400-4xx
VAQ EFA-18G 6 Aircraft Side number 500-5xx
VAW E-2C 4 Aircraft(future airwings will have 5 E-2D) Side number 600-60x
HSC MH-60S 6-8 Aircraft Side number 610-61x
HSM MH-60R 6-8 Aircraft Side number ???

When I cruised on Constellation and Nimitz with CVW-9 in 1990-1991, the E-2's occupied the front of the hanger and were generally parked forward of elevator #1( L-1) just inside the door. Normally there is only one in the hanger but that would depend on whether there was maintenance to be done. Hornets, Prowlers and Intruders occupied the area between L-1 and L-3 and were parked in no particular order. The Tomcat's occupied the aft area between L-3 and L-4. The various maintanence shops for the squadrons were scattered all over the ship on, or a deck or two above the hanger deck, so it was just a matter of luck, if your jet was parked outside you shop on the hanger deck! The enlisted maintainers stayed in great shape running parts all over the ship!!

You normally would not be moving aircraft from the deck to the hanger during flight ops. You can physically do it, but there is a lot going on during a launch and recovery so why make it harder than it needs to be.

There are generally one of two types of operations going on for launching and recovering aircraft.

Cyclic Ops is when you launch all of the aircraft scheduled to take off, and then recover any aircraft that are airborne. You do this every 45 minute to an hour and 15 minutes, for a current airwing. In my day we did it every hour and a half. This is the normal way to run flight ops. The airplan is the document that is published every day and defines the times that each event will launch and recover. It is enforced by the Air Boss fairly rigidly. If the aircraft in an event, say a launch at 10am, are all ready to go at 9:55 am, the boss will not signal a green deck until 10am! It kind of needs to be done that way to keep the carrier, the ships in the battle group, and the airwing on the same sheet of paper.

Flex deck is when you launch and recover aircraft at the same time. This is pretty hard to sustain. You have to keep most of the airwing flying because there is not a lot of room to park aircraft when you run this kind of operation. The handler basically juggles airplanes unitl it is time to wrap up flight ops and then landed aircraft are pulled/taxied forward. You normally have aircraft parked on catapult # 2 ( the 2 row), so you can only launch using one catapult. You would normally run this kind of deck for CQ ( carrier quals) or a special tactical situations. We did it in my day for outer air battle ops.

I hope that helps. What I described was/is typical but there can be variations and the Midway/Forrestal Class Carriers did it a little different because of the different elevator layout.

I hope that helps,

Mark

Send me a PM with your mail adress, I've scanned and colored those from the D&S book, but it's too big to be posted here.

3-build it to make you happy, not to impress or compete with any other builds on here This site and the modelers on here are not competative, we all pretty much build to our own abilities and tastes, no one is judging anyone else's work, so just have fun!