Aircraft mother ship
Seaplane carriers were before and in World War I upgraded to seeflugzeugtragenden ships seagoing vessels from which Seaplanes for aerial reconnaissance were used by sea. They were the forerunners of the aircraft carriers .
history
The aircraft mother ships were created before and during the First World War by converting freighters , passenger ships , ferries and old warships to use float planes for aerial reconnaissance over the sea. The British Navy called their first such ships " Parent Ship for Seaplanes "; for more developed from the very beginning seeflugzeugtragenden ships that led the Royal Navy , the term Seaplane Carrier - Seeflugzeugträger - one.
The first aircraft mother ship was the Foudre , which entered service by the French Navy in 1912, two years after the world's first seaplane flight with Henri Fabre as pilot. During the First World War, the aircraft mother ships were primarily used as a base for reconnaissance flights. Operations with fast fleet units turned out to be impracticable because of the mostly low speed of these ships and / or because of the time-consuming aircraft removal and reinsertion on the water for take-off and landing, during which the aircraft mother ship had to lie motionless on the water. Therefore, the one developed aircraft cruisers and aircraft carriers for Radflugzeuge . In the interwar period, the aircraft mother ships therefore disappeared from the fleets.
The first air raid from a ship was flown by the Japanese aircraft mother ship Wakamiya in 1914 during the Japanese siege of the German colony of Tsingtau in China.
Germany
The German Imperial Navy deployed a total of five aircraft mother ships in the course of the First World War, all of which were converted freighters that carried two to four aircraft. These ships were used in the North and Baltic Seas, and bombing raids were even carried out from the aircraft mother ships against Russian naval aviation stations on the Baltic Sea.
In April / May 1918 the German navy captured several Russian and formerly Romanian ships lying in Sevastopol , which had been converted into aircraft mother ships by the Imperial Russian Navy . Some of them were still put into service under the German flag, but were no longer used. Among them were the Almas , a former small cruiser (3285 t, 19 knots, 3-4 aircraft), the Respublikanets , a former passenger ship (9240 t, 15 kn, 7-9 aircraft), her sister ship, the Aviator (9240 t, 15 kn, 7–9 aircraft) and the former Romanian Rumyniya , leased from Russia in 1916 , also a former passenger ship (4500 t, 18 kn, 4–7 aircraft).
technology
For the conversion of ships to aircraft mother ships, the best available sea vessels were used, but these ships were not suitable for their new task. With their limited possibilities, aircraft now had to be handled on them. Sheds placed on the upper decks served as hangars, or hangars were simply dispensed with entirely. The existing cargo booms had to dismount the aircraft for take-off and later re-boarding after the water landing , a difficult task with the relatively unsuitable crane equipment. The greatest disadvantage of these makeshift vehicles turned out to be the necessity of being stopped during take-off and landing for taking off and on board, which largely precluded use of the fleet at sea.
literature
- Siegfried Breyer: Aircraft cruisers, aircraft mother ships , aircraft tenders up to 1945 , Podzun-Pallas-Verlag, Wölfersheim-Berstadt, 1994, ISBN 3-7909-0509-7 .
- Dieter Jung, Berndt Wenzel, Arno Abendroth: Ships and boats of the German sea pilots 1912-1976 , Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart, 1st edition, 1977, ISBN 3-87943-469-7 .
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ Answald (FS I), Santa Elena (FS II), Oswald (FS III), Glyndwr and Adeline Hugo Stinnes 3
- ↑ World Aircraft Carriers List: Russia & The Soviet Union