A Submersible aircraft carrier...?

Question

Well alright I was looking at aircraft like the AV-8 (Harrier) and the F-35.

Now, i'm just curious that if the F-35 does work out as good as we think it will...would it become more feasible/possible to build a Submersible Aircraft Carrier? Think about it- if you have a carrier; one or two large vent openings on the top of it, have them open (going into the ship, not just flipping open).

Then logically you could send multiple vertical-take-off aircraft flying out of the ship.

Send up, take off, and repeat. and for landing back into the ship:

Vent port opens- Aircraft vertically lands into the ship, kind of like a helipad- and you roll it along inside the ship so other aircraft can get in, and just park the aircraft. Sounds simple enough, we do more complex things already in the military as far as landing procedures go; so let's land a aircraft vertically into a ship that can submerge itself instead of trying what the Japanese did, or trying to launch an aircraft out of a tube as some idea's I've heard. :-/

The idea sounds simple- only beef I have with this idea is that your going to need a lot of water to fill the hull if you want to submerge it. That can be done, only question is- "Is it possible to make it stealthy?". If there is not a way, well we could deal with it. Because most good scientist crews can find a way to hide a car, a small boat- but how do you hide a giant submersible aircraft carrier?

Any other possible theories that could get aircraft out of a aircraft carrier faster AND more efficient without compromising the safety of the pilots/crew/ship? You can't launch aircraft by cable when the entire deck is flooded, and you can't just up and lift an entire deck out of a ship either. Sounds simpler to just to have a water tight vent open up and slide the metal into the ship like a drawer; except it's open when it's inside the ship. >.>

Anyone wanna comment this?

Answer 1

Honestly, making it stealthy wouldn't be much of an issue, you can't hear our subs as is, and hearing is the only way to find things under water. Your idea is actually quite feasible, although would be astronomically expensive. To launch, you'd have to come to surface, which is just a matter of emptying some ballast tanks (all submersibles float when the ballast tanks are empty, obviously), and take off vertically.

Answer 2

Your concept isn't exactly original and it's about as useful now as it was when first proposed more than a half-century ago.



The Japanese actually deployed such beasts during WWII. After several false starts and really bad designs they came up with the I-400 class. 2 of this class were built and just like the preceeding I-13 and I-14 were big and clumsy to handle underwater and easy to detect. With a surfaced displacement of 5,223 tons they were the largest submarines built before the nuclear age and could carry a whopping 3 floatplanes. Each aircraft could carry 1 torpedo or two 227kg bombs at a blistering 295mph - not exactly earth-shattering. It took 15 minutes to prepare the aircraft once surfaced. The boats were captured at the end of the war and the assessment was summed up as; "For peacetime surface cruising this sub could not be beat but when submerged in combat sucha huge, low-speed, low-endurance, target with a shallow test depth could not last long against a modern ASW team."



And there lies the rub. These boats were lousy aircraft carriers and lousy submarines. 3 aircraft was not enough to offer real offensive power and they were too big and unwieldy to do normal submarine things.



A modern submarine carrier would have many of the same problems and more. The complete lack of a strategic or tactical role is a pretty tough hurdle to jump. A submarine carrier could carry only a fraction of the aircraft, fuel and ordnance of a conventional carrier and at a dramatically higher cost. It would have to surface to launch and recover aircraft thus sacrificing the submarines entire reason for being - undetectability. Sustained air operations would be simply impossible without an impossibly large and expensive ship. The ship would be vulnerable, it could not carry many aircraft nor could it sustain operations for any significant period of time. High intensity air operations and the alleged virtues of a submarine carrier are polar opposite requirements. This leaves the "Panama Canal" attack model of a 1-time suicide strike as the only mission profile and who wants to spend tens of billions of dollars on that?



***EDIT****



No. What you propose is not only completely unnecessary but also total science fiction. Not technically feasible or practical. You fail to get the point. The roles of submarine and aircraft carrier are fundamentally incompatible. A submarine derives its stealth from being under water. Make it launch aircraft you have no reason to make the vessel a submarine. A "stealthy" real carrier would be far more effective at a fraction of the cost. And remember too, a big part of a carriers job is deterrence. The fact that the enemy KNOWS it is there is often enough to prevent hostile action. You can't get that with a sub.

Answer 3

Submersible Aircraft Carrier

Answer 4

All aircraft carriers are submersible, if you hit them right...