From tethered balloons to floating airbases: the aircraft carrier's rise
The first ships to carry aircraft were wooden vessels lofting single tethered observation balloons. A little over a century later, nuclear-powered supercarriers each hold dozens of jets and helicopters. With its planes and defences included, a carrier is often described as the largest weapon system humans have ever built.
Seven years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, the pilot Eugene Ely took off in a Curtiss Pusher from a platform on the cruiser USS Birmingham, on 14 November 1910. Two months later he landed on a platform fitted to another cruiser in San Francisco Bay. In May 1912 the Royal Navy's Charles Samson became the first to take off from a ship while it was moving. After the Second World War, carriers displaced battleships as fleet flagships, and sea battles shifted from exchanges of gunfire to air strikes launched from beyond the horizon.
Their strategic appeal is freedom. Operating in international waters, a carrier needs no permission to use another country's airfields and trespasses on no one's territory. Former First Sea Lord Sir Mark Stanhope put it bluntly: nations wanting global influence have carriers. Henry Kissinger called one 100,000 tons of diplomacy.
Carriers are grouped mainly by how their aircraft get airborne and back down. The biggest use catapults for launch and arresting wires for landing, and can operate the heaviest, most heavily armed planes; all but China's Fujian are nuclear-powered. Others rely on a short run to take off, or use jets that can land vertically, such as the Harrier and the F-35B. Speed matters in every design: above about 30 knots a carrier can outrun submarines, and faster movement creates more wind over the deck, giving planes extra lift for fuel and weapons.
Labels can be political. The Soviet Admiral Kuznetsov was officially a heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser, partly to avoid a treaty that barred aircraft carriers from sailing through the Turkish Straits. As of September 2026, fifteen navies operate 50 active carriers. The United States runs 11 huge nuclear-powered ones, each carrying roughly 80 fighters.
Source: Aircraft carrier
