In early April, 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a few desolate rocks in the South Atlantic. The British mobilized their fleet in response. On the 25th, a force retook South Georgia, a even smaller and more desolate island that Argentina had also captured, while the main task force closed in on the Falklands. May 1st saw the British launch their attack. The Argentine Navy tried to interfere the next day, but withdrew after the cruiser General Belgrano was sunk by a submarine. Two days later, the Argentines struck back, sinking the frigate Sheffield with an Exocet missile. Both sides settled in for a siege while the British waited for the amphibious force to arrive.¹

HMS Brilliant

On May 12th, the weather had improved, and Hermes was able to fly her first CAP mission since the 9th. The Harriers were fitted with 1000 lb bombs to be dropped from high altitude, the first level-bombing attacks from the Fleet Air Arm since 1940. These added to the ongoing bombardment from the fleet, supplied on the 12th by Brilliant and Glasgow. Shortly after noon, Brilliant detected an inbound raid, and the CAP was out of position to intercept. Fortunately, the group was about 15 miles out to sea, resting between bombardments and giving plenty of space for the missiles to engage. But when Glasgow's Sea Dart was ordered to fire on the attackers, it detected a problem and refused. The destroyer opened fire with her 4.5" gun, which jammed after 8 rounds. The Sea Wolf, though, functioned perfectly. Brilliant launched three missiles, two of which struck the incoming A-4 Skyhawks, blowing them apart. The third target dodged the missile by flying into the sea, and while it was too late to engage the last Skyhawk, its bomb skipped over Glasgow instead of hitting. Read more...

A couple of installments ago, when I discussed safety, I talked about the standard procedure for addressing airplane-level structural problems found before they cause a crash. But the majority of aviation incidents today are more complicated, mostly because of how good we are at finding purely mechanical problems before they bring down a plane. I’m going to neglect terrorism and other outside factors throughout, as that’s a rather different discussion.

A rare crash with a happy ending

When people think of plane crashes, they tend to think of the plane slamming into the ground, and everyone onboard being killed immediately. While this does happen, it’s actually fairly rare. All of 2017 passed without an incident of this type, although there were three in 2018, most notably the Lion Air crash, and another in 2019. In the US, the last mainline crash where everyone onboard was killed was that of American Flight 587, in November of 2001. That crash was due to structural failure after the co-pilot overused the rudder to counter wake turbulence from the plane taking off ahead of them. Read more...

When I first talked about fire control, I briefly mentioned the problems of rangekeeping. This is the practice of turning the ranges produced by rangefinders into values that can be used for gunnery. I'll expand on them, and look at the early mechanisms used to solve these problems.

The first problem is that rangefinders do not produce the ranges that the guns need to be aimed at. A good rangefinder will produce a close approximation of the current (geometric) range to the target,² and this is adequate at short ranges. As range increases, the shell falls more steeply, which decreases the "danger space", where the shell falling long or short will still hit. Even worse, long-range fire takes longer to reach the target. Even if rangefinder range is accurate and can be transmitted instantly to the guns, the target will have moved by the time the shells reach it. The obvious solution is to predict where the target will be, and to aim there, but this is harder than it looks, because both the ship and the target are moving, and the solution changes as the ships move. Solving any specific case might not be that difficult on paper, but solving the problem in real time is a very different matter. Read more...

To conclude our look at the history of the units of the Iowa class, let's take a look at Wisconsin,³ the last American battleship built by hull number.

Wisconsin sliding down the launching ways

Wisconsin's keel, the last for a completed American battleship, was laid at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, on January 25th, 1941, and she was launched on the second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. She commissioned only five months later, on April 16th, 1944,⁴ and after some training on the East Coast, departed for the Pacific, where she joined Halsey's 3rd Fleet in early December. Only 9 days later, she found herself in the midst of Typhoon Cobra, which capsized three destroyers and damaged numerous other ships. Read more...

The Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is the larger of the two non-military US uniformed services. Like the NOAA Commissioned Corps, it is composed only of officers, who use naval ranks and uniforms.⁵ Approximately 6,700 medical personnel, including doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, therapists, veterinarians, scientists, and environmental health professionals, make up the corps, and serve in support of numerous federal and state health projects. Like their counterparts in the NOAA Corps, members of the PHS Corps are given their commissions directly after they complete their education.

The roots of the PHS Corps go back to 1798, when Congress passed an act mandating the creation of hospitals for merchant seaman. In 1870, after a series of scandals surrounding the loosely-controlled marine hospitals, the service was centralized as the aptly-named Marine Hospital Service. John Maynard Woodworth was appointed as the Supervising Surgeon-General of the Service, an office that later evolved into the modern Surgeon General, and quickly established a new model. Physicians would wear military uniforms and were assigned to the Service as a whole, instead of to a specific facility, allowing them to be moved as needed. The next few decades saw the MHS gain more responsibility for public health problems in general, including quarantine of ships that might carry disease, health screening of the tide of immigrants arriving at ports like Ellis Island, handling epidemics ashore, and even running hospitals for Native Americans. In 1902, the MHS became the Public Health Service, the backbone of which was still the commissioned corps of physicians. Read more...

On August 27th, 1943, the sloop HMS Egret was lost in the Bay of Biscay. By itself, this wasn't of particular note, as the Biscay campaign was hard on the ships that fought it. But she was sunk by a new type of weapon, one that would ultimately change the face of naval warfare.

HMS Egret

The early years of WWII had seen a sort of impasse develop between ships and the aircraft that tried to sink them. If the aircraft bombed from high altitude, it was essentially immune to defensive fire, but the moving ship was far too difficult a target to be worth going after. If it approached at low level, it might hit, but it also gave the ship a chance to hit back. This went double for torpedo bombers, which had to attack at such low level that they were vulnerable to even small-arms fire. Dive bombers had found a way to at least partially resolve this problem, but that was restricted to comparatively small aircraft, which did not have the range to operate far from shore. The Germans, driven from the surface of the sea and hunted intensively below it, needed some way to challenge Allied control of the waves from the air without sacrificing too many planes from the dwindling Luftwaffe. Read more...

Once again, it is time for our regular open thread. You're allowed to talk about whatever you wish.

The Naval Institute recently published a very interesting article on the Fat Leonard scandal. While it focuses on the impact on promotion and reassignment of how long things have dragged on, it also gives a good overview of the scandal as a whole.

Since last time, I've overhauled the posts on Pre-Dreadnoughts, Basics of Naval Strategy, the second part of Russian Battleships, So You Want to Build a Battleship - Strategic Background, and the last two installments of Why the Carriers Are Not Doomed.

In the mid-1930s, it was apparent to all that the battleship holiday would soon come to an end. The existing battlefleets were growing increasingly obsolescent, while the other European naval powers had each laid down a pair of new battleships of their own. It was expected that the Second London Naval Conference would allow the major powers to resume construction of capital ships, and the British were faced with the need to build the first battleship since the Nelsons a decade earlier. The final result, while often overlooked in favor of its American, German, and Japanese contemporaries, gave good service in the crucible of war.

King George V in 1945

Work on what became the King George V began in 1933, as the first London Treaty expired on January 1st, 1937, and if ships were to be laid down on that date, orders would have to be placed in mid-1936. A number of sketch designs were prepared to a set of requirements that seem curiously retrograde. The armament was to be in four twin turrets, two forward and two aft,⁶ while the single-purpose secondary battery of 6" guns was to be in casemates for reliability. A speed of 23 kts was requested for compatibility with the existing battleships, as it was thought that the existing battlecruisers would be adequate for a few more years. Great emphasis was placed on protection, as the new battleship might face enemies armed with 15" and 16" guns, as well as the growing threat of the dive bomber, armed with 1,000 or even 2,000 lb bombs. Major changes included an emphasis on aircraft, considered useful for spotting fire, scouting, and torpedo attack,⁷ and the provision of quintuple torpedo tubes on either side for use in a night action. The base specification called for only 12" weapons, in accordance with the British negotiating position at the upcoming London conference, but the result, protected against 16" gunfire, was characterized as being grossly unbalanced.⁸ Read more...

This post was written by my sister during the original run of this series on SSC.

I was reading through what bean had posted on commercial aviation earlier, and I ran across a question about why hubs exist. As much as I love my darling brother, I don’t think the answer he gave did justice to the complex, wonderful world of airports. And yes, I am that person who actually enjoys long layovers, and thinks that the airport textbooks bean has given me for my birthday and Christmas are very good gifts. One of the highlights of my summer was sitting in an airport reading an airport management textbook. It was glorious.⁹

Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, famous as a hub for Delta

Airlines are famously a “pray really hard, cross your fingers, and hope you’ll make enough money to buy a new plane or retrofit old ones” industry. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is expecting airlines across the world to have a near record total net profit of $29.8 billion, with a profit margin of 4.1% in 2017. The $29.8 billion number might sound really great, but that’s the net profit of all of IATA’s 278 member airlines. This works out to about $107 million per airline, which is enough to buy 89.7% of a Boeing 737 MAX9 (list price of $119.2 million as of May 2017). Granted, some of the IATA airlines made more, some made less, and some lost money, but we’ll use averages for simplicity’s sake. It’s important to remember that most airlines don’t pay full price for their planes, ¹⁰ and the purchase of planes is generally funded by either sale of stock or large loans. Hubs save airlines a lot of money. I’ll leave an in-depth explanation of the costs of a commercial flight to someone else (ahem, bean),¹¹ but, in essence, airlines only make money when their planes are in the air, and a plane costs roughly the same to fly whether it’s full or not, because the weight of an additional passenger and their baggage is a drop in the bucket compared to the empty weight of the plane itself. So, airlines make the most money off of full flights, and bleed money on the flights where half the seats are empty. Airlines have a very good incentive to run flights as full as possible. Even though I might want to travel from, say, Lawton, Oklahoma to Lewiston, Idaho, there will never be a direct flight from Lawton to Lewiston because there isn’t enough demand (or really any demand at all- let’s be honest, there’s not much in Lawton,¹² and there’s not much in Lewiston¹³). This is where hubs come in. Read more...

I've previously mentioned that during the 1950s the Iowas were fitted with a 16" nuclear shell, the Mk 23 "Katie".¹⁴ This is a fascinating device, one of a plethora of nuclear weapons that were developed in the mid-50s. But how did the Katie come about, and what modifications were made to the battleships to allow them to use it?

Me with the Mk 23 at the National Atomic Museum¹⁵

The Katie has its origins in the Mk 9, the world's first artillery-fired atomic projectile (AFAP). The Mk 9 was the Army's first nuclear weapon, part of its bid to keep itself relevant in an era when atomic weapons were expected to dominate the battlefield of the future.¹⁶ The designers faced serious challenges. An artillery shell is an incredibly difficult environment to put a complicated device like a nuclear warhead. It must withstand normal handling, thousands of Gs of acceleration as it's fired, and the centrifuge of a shell spinning at 10,000 rpm or more. It must be incredibly reliable, as a nuclear shell that doesn't go off is not only a waste of money but might give the target valuable materials or insight. And it needs to be compact, as big artillery pieces are heavy, expensive, and difficult to move. Ideally, a nuclear shell would be for an existing weapon, probably the 240 mm M1 howitzer, the biggest gun in the Army's inventory. Read more...