Tracy White wrote:
PriFly is the Primary Flight Control Center on USN carriers and is essentially the control tower. It's one easy way to visually Identify Enterprise versus Yorktown. They both had one on the port side of the island forward on the catwalks, but Enterprise had an extra one aft. Yorktown's can be seen just behind the shoulders of the sailor on
this Navsource photo and Enterprise's
here. Enterprise's extra PriFly is in the lower right hand corner of that last picture and the corresponding empty area on Yorktown is visible
here.
Hi Tracy,
Actually, its not an extra Pri-Fly. It is Secondary Flight Control (Sec-Fly), and while CV-6 had hers enclosed some time around 1940, the other two sisters had Sec-Fly stations in the same location (note the wider catwalk). It is just that it was an open position on the three sisters as originally built. Only CV-6 got hers enclosed.
In case anyone was wondering, CV-5 and CV-6 were built side by side from the same set of plans and as completed, were virtually identical, to the point that their skippers had trouble telling them apart. (Hence the big Y on the stack to identify Yorktown.) Not just typical class member sisters, which always have small differences, but true identical twin sister ships.
Gradually, small modifications like CV-6's Sec-Fly enclosure, and CV-5's big bridge walk around (with aerodynamic wind deflector built in) began to distinguish them, but from a modeling point of view, CV-5 and CV-6 at Midway were just a matter of specific AA positions and the two features mentioned, along with radar and antenna and minor equipment rig differences. They were a lot closer than most think, even then. CV-8 had many improvements on the original plan, but again, the basic structures were still remarkably close or identical. I'd say the Essexes exhibit far more ship to ship differences than the Yorktowns, even accounting for CV-8 and CV-6's post 10/43 major refit.