aircraft carrier

Navy Tests New Aircraft Carrier by Blasting the Area With 40,000 Pounds of Explosives

The "full ship shock trials" are conducted to prepare the USS Gerald R. Ford for potential war.

Dang, This Guy Gets Blown the Heck Away By an Aircraft Takeoff

That’s a bit of a tumble, ain’t it? Watch as this crew member gets blown away on the flight deck after the EA-6B Prowler took off. It’s pretty scary, especially since he gets blown pretty damn close to the jet blast defector (and that he’s on an aircraft carrier), but he manages to regain his…

How to Build an Aircraft Carrier 

Building a floating city also known as an aircraft carrier is hard as hell to do because the numbers are basically unfathomable. A basic aircraft carrier is made of 60,000 tons of steel, 4.5 acres of non-skid surface with four 325-foot catapults. The whole thing weighs 200 million pounds and takes five years to build…

Watch a Plane Fall Off an Aircraft Carrier After a Cable Suddenly Snaps

Here’s an E-2C Hawkeye trying to land on the USS Eisenhower. Everything seems normal until the arresting cable on the carrier—which is supposed to snare an aircraft as it lands—suddenly snaps. The airplane almost looks like a runaway car until it drops and disappears out of view, off the carrier. Luckily, the aircraft managed to…

Cool time lapse of an aircraft carrier being assembled piece by piece

Man, building an aircraft carrier is just like playing with Lego bricks! At a much, much larger scale, of course. Here is footage showing how the final section of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier the HMS Prince of Wales was slapped on top of the ship. The piece, known as Aft Island, weighs 750 tonnes…

This Airplane Looks Like It May Have Flown Back to the Future

We don’t know if Doc Brown worked on this F/A-18C Hornet, seen here taking off. We don’t know if it had a Flux capacitor on board. We also don’t know if it was only traveling at 88 mph when this photo was taken, although it seems unlikely. However, we do know it looks like it’s…

An Aircraft Carrier Commander’s Last Day In the “Office”

This photo of Captain Christopher Bolt preparing for his last flight looks like a painting, bringing together Bolt’s monochrome profile and the ragged reflection of the carrier’s megastructure on the coating of plane window. It’s almost poetic. According to the Navy, Bolt is part of its “only forward-deployed aircraft carrier,” the USS Ronald Reagan. In…

This Is the Coolest Place to Control Your Body, Mind and Spirit

Beach yoga? Mountain yoga? River yoga? Dusk yoga? None of these can compete with… aircraft carrier sunrise yoga! Sept. 20, 2015: Sailors participate in a sunrise yoga class aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) as a part of Suicide Prevention Month. Theodore Roosevelt is deployed in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of…

Watch this awesome electromagnetic catapult test on an aircraft carrier

This is going to be so cool. The US Navy commissioned an electromagnetic launcher for testing on the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and the system will be much more efficient and smoother in launching planes in the future. It’s the first time things have been shot off the ship without the old steam…

Packed Like Sardines in a Can

From this point of view it seems that one cannot fit a knife between two planes in the crammed hangar bay of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, where sailors perform maintenance on F/A-18 Super Hornets. Let’s play! How many aircraft can you count in this photo? [Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ryan McFarlane/U.S.…

Transporting an Enormous Aircraft Carrier, Piece By Piece

BAE Systems has just published an amazing time lapse video showing how the largest section of Britain’s second Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carrier was tossed and towed to Rosyth Dockyard from the dock in Glasgow where it was built. Lower Block 04 is the largest hull section of HMS Prince Of Wales, and the 11,200…

Cool time-lapse of a US aircraft carrier crossing the new Suez Canal for the first time

Watch the USS Theodore Roosevelt navigate through the new Suez Canal with all of its fighter jets on deck. It’s super cool because the aircraft carrier is so big and the water of the canal is so calm that it feels like the Earth is moving around the land formation that is the USS Theodore…

Watch these amazing F-18 night launches from an aircraft carrier

Here’s a really cool video of F-18s taking off from the USS Theodore Roosevelt at night. It’s so cool to see these flying beasts just kick off in an instant with flames burning at their tails. And it’s even more impressive to see this happen at night. With all that said, my favorite part of…

Watch a US Navy aircraft carrier launch all its F-18s

You’re only a couple feet away from F-18 Hornets launching from an aircraft carrier. You hear the power of the fighter jets, feel the closeness of these flying killing machines and see the impossibility of their take off. The fighter jet starts moving and get up in the air in such a short distance that…

The perfection of jet takeoffs from aircraft carriers in one photo

Fighter jets and aircraft carriers and fighter jets taking off of aircraft carriers are some of our favorite things in the world for so many reasons. One of them is just how perfect each launch has to be. Just look at how the wheels of the jet reach the end of the aircraft carrier as…

This Nuclear Carrier Is Leaving the Atomic Winter Behind

Somehow this photo of the fourth nuclear-powered aircraft carrier of the United States makes us feel like this cruel winter will never end. USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) departed Naval Station Norfolk for a scheduled deployment on March 11, 2015, and left the frozen Eastern Coast for warmer seas. [Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin…

Cool video shows fighter jet takeoff from a completely new perspective

Here’s awesome footage from underneath a MiG-29 showing the fighter jet taking off from an aircraft carrier. The view is insane, you see the jets fire up and watch the world turn blurry as the MiG launches itself into the air. There’s a surprising, almost sort of peaceful awesomeness when it starts flying and leaves…

France’s Nuclear Aircraft Carrier,  Aglow in the Dark

This long exposure night shot shows a Rafale M multirole fighter aircraft parking on the flight deck of Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, the flagship of the French Navy. Charles de Gaulle is the only nuclear-powered carrier completed outside of the United States Navy. It started military operations against Islamic State in Iraq on the…

How Many Sailors Does It Take to Change 111 Light Bulbs?

Three! In this picture, a small team of sailors replace 111 light bulbs on the super structure of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76). Reagan is currently homeported in San Diego, undergoing a Planned Incremental Availability (PIA) maintenance period at Naval Base Coronado. And serving as a punchline for our awful jokes.[Mass Communication…

Spectacular scenes like this, viewed from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, on February 8th, always make me want to join the Navy. The carrier is supporting Operation Inherent Resolve, the military intervention against ISIL, and now transits the Persian Gulf. [Petty Officer 2nd Class John Philip Wagner, Jr./U.S. Navy/DoD]