Re: How to: Augment an Aircraft Carrier.
The whole thing is symptomatic of a lack of ambition within the MoD and government. The very fact that the question was asked at all shows the consequence of the myopic attitude they've had towards catapults and arrester gear.
Had they put cats and traps on then they could have used the US COD - basically a carrier capable air freighter. And instead of bolting a (quite nice) radar to the side of a helo they could have easily and cheaply put it on top of an existing fixed wing carrier capable aircraft and flown it at a higher altitude with longer endurance.
By missing the cats and traps out there's no basic fixed wing airframes that can be flown off those decks. Everything has to be stovl, immediately limiting the choice of available airframes.
They nearly did it, only to come up with an absurdly pessimistic assessment of a technology that was basically already working, and never set that against the potentially huge cost of never, ever being able to use basic support aircraft types like COD. Crazy. They decided that short term financial certainty was more important than long term operational flexibility.
They didn't have COD in the Falklands, and we're reduced to throwing essential supplies out of the back of a Hercules into the sea and fishing them out before they sank. Not easy in a south Atlantic winter storm...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
