WW II cruiser hangers

I'm no ship expert, but why would you want the aircraft on hand for search and rescue. Who would they be searching for and rescuing. I don't know what planes US ships carried, but in other navy's, they were not that big. It would make more sense to have the aircraft in the air during battle to do things like watch fall of shot, warn the ship of any other enemy ships that may be approaching and other tasks. And i would think it would be awkward to launch the aircraft during battle.

Thanks for responding. The aircraft used was the OS2U Kingfish. It was used for recon work. I believe they were also used to direct surface units and submarines to locations where downed pilots were awaiting rescue. The planes were launched from catapults on the stern. Their location made them susceptible to damage because they were exposed. They were also vulnerable to flash damage and explosion from the ships own stern most main battery. After several instances of damage to the planes and ships they were flown off to land bases. I believe it shows poor design considerations but still an interesting subject to add to the realism of a model. By the time these ships came into service most main gun fire was radar directed and aircraft were no longer required to spot the fall of shot. Air support for ground action used forward air controllers on the ground as well as aircraft from carriers.

Best regards

Jack

Hello,

Go to navsouce.com to look up New Orleans class heavy cruiser's ( 7 ship's in the class) , There are LOTS of photo's. They will also have photo's of the  Baltimore's and Cleveland's.

Good luck and Happy Holiday's

  Both Balttleships and Cruisers that had their catapults on the stern had no enclosed hangers. The older cruiser classes that had catapults amidships did have a hanger. It was basically a large open enclosure much like a two car garage with a corrigated metal overhead door. In most cases, there were two doors with a pillar in the middle dividing the two. They aren't the best, but here are links to two pictures of such a hanger:

http://www.navsource.org/archives/04/028/0402840.jpg

 The interior would be mostly open space with assorted equipment lining the walls, and maybe even the center between the two sides of the hanger. The aircraft were stored with wings folded.

 Also, I don't know where the story that they off loaded the aircraft came from, but they were used throughout the war for gunnery spotting, mostly when they were shelling land targets. They were used for rescue, and in one case one of the little Kingfishers rescued nine airmen! He cuoldn't fly, but he could taxi on the water until a ship got to them. The book "Boys of the Battleship North Carolina" has several great stories of the aircraft it had on board.

Gene

Gene,

Thanks for the response.

I believe that the flat open area between the catapults was the entry area to a below deck hanger area. It's also my understanding that the USS South Dakota set fire to her own planes during one of the the Guadalcanal sea battles. After that the planes were flown off prior to a surface sea engagement. How many captains / admirals etc. chose to exercise that option I don't know. But I'm getting sidetracked with tactics and practices. I know there were hangers. What I don't know is how they were used and how they operated. I've seen one picture (USS Boston) with the hanger open and a longetudanal cross section showing two area at the stern marked "H" which I assume means Hanger.

Happy Holidays and may your wife/son/daughter/significant other buy you that $229.00 model ship!

Jack

  Interesting. Yes they destroyed their own aircraft at times but there were no more surface engagements after that to speak of. I don't know of any surviving cruisers, but I do know that the USS Alabama, a much larger ship, had no such hangers. I'll check some old sources I have and see if I find anything. Yeah, all my sources are old, just like me :-) 

  OK, I stand corrected by none other than "Jane's Fighting Ships of World War II" (a re-print, I'm not quite that old!). It indicates those ships did have a hanger with a sliding rectangular cover that ran on tracks of some sort. Sliding forward to open. It gives no information on or pictures of the interior. Should have looked before I typed. 

Gene

The hangar on a cruiser might well be crammed with wings, something they'd go through. Engines too, and they were a good spot for chapel services.

Battleships and cruisers had Curtiss SOC Seagulls immediately before they had Kingfishers, and most cruisers operated those biplanes during the war. Certainly they got torn up.

Gene

Sometimes Older is Better. I try and tell myself that every morning and my old bones tell me that there's just no way older is better!

Cheers

Jack

One of the other problems discovered with operating floatplanes during the early 40's is that, compared to ships, planes are very fragile things.

Also, while a floatplane does allow you to land the aircraft anywhere there is water, the state of that water matters.  In sea states that barely affected a cruiser or BB, you could not land a floatplane (which is makes for a bad day for the aviator in those days before aerial refueling and on bingo fuel).

If the sea is not too rough, then you get into the complexities of things as light as a Duck, Kingfisher, or Seahawk and those with the mass of a battlewagon.  It's actually some difficult to get a largge combatant ship truly dead-in-the-water.  Ship handlers want "way" on, just so the ship will respond to control inputs.

It's not always convenient to put a couple of MWB over the side to warp the a/c up alongside, too (which, by doctrine, was the best a/c recovery method). Even so, whaleboats and launches needed significant padding so as to not damage the floatplane, too.  Which is fussy work, especially in winter, and doubly so as the latitude gets higher than 45º North, or South.

So, some whacky alternatives were tried.  Only one with much success was a net bent to a spar, streamed from an after boat boom.  The putative aviator taxied his a/c up until it washed up on the net.  Then, the net was heaved around until the crane could collect it.

Which worked, except it often wrecked the rudder on the float.  Or if a wing float was not holed or damaged in the process.   It was also far too easy to drive the a/c up over the spar on the net, and that never worked out well.

But, what really put the floatplanes into storage was that an SBD with 1115 mile range at 185mph was a much better scout than an OS2U with only 805 miles at 117mph.  Flying them off before a battle probably smart for not having them exposed (and full of flammables) to anything which gets shot at you.  That, and writing up the damage report for flash-burning all the fabric surfaces off would not be good for anyone's career, either.

Ahoy Capn,

Your right about the paper work. I've often wondered if the paper work was proportional to the size of the subject or exponential. Surely the paper work for losing a Battleship would be more than losing a MWB.  By the way I have read that the USS South Dakota's float planes did a magnificent job of letting the Japanese know exactly where she was that night of Guadalcanal.

Best regards,

jack

*_*

OK, to avoid an aneurism I'm going to keep this somewhat short. General hangar layout can be seen in a damage plate in the Repair in Forward areas booklet I posted under the ships Houston CL-81. Some further detail is visible in this photo Navsource has for USS Birmingham CL-62. I've got some photos of the hangar bay I need to sit on for a while for a project, but can generally say that the aircraft were stored to the side (outboard) of the elevators and the hangars were surprisingly roomier than we'd think today.

Maybe you are looking for something like this?

http://forum.modelship.com.tw/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=6610&sid=4bb2586b669be7cb31782430d7b1c516

Note I don't know about the accuracy but that's hanger open on baltimore. Apparently it was based off floating drydocks's 1/192 plan.

Thanks Tracy!

Jack

That is very much like I had in mind

Thanks,

Jack

Aircraft were recovered by turning the ship sharply into the wind. The sharp turn of a large ship created a "slick" on which the plane landed. Also, aircraft recovery did not involve stopping the ship. The recovering ship streamed a device called a "sled"--essentially a rope mat--from the aircraft crane. The aircraft taxied over the sled and a hook on the main float engaged it. At that point the pilot or observer stood up in the open cockpit and attached the aircraft to the crane which was now overhead, and the aircraft was hoisted aboard--all without stopping the ship. You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQA6Ctq9m30

Cheers,

John Snyder, White Ensign Models, http://WhiteEnsignModels.com

This reminds me of seaplane tender operations in the Antarctic in 1946, Operation Highjump.

Seaplane recovery and operation, in this case with Mariners, involved pumping oil onto the sea, IIRC.

Anyways off topic.

I'm searching for a photo I found of the (undamaged) interior of a New orleans class hangar, including a number of hard to identify objects.

Plate 3 of San Francisco's Guadalcanal Damage report should help a little bit with hangar shape for some. Best I've found for other classes with midships hangars are the Google Life Images:

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=8d7d9c430ec85524

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=d55c8d84b046c1d3

There are more there than I've posted.

Here's one of the two pictures i was thinking of.

If you haven't seen it, look up the famous LIFE story on board CA-34 Astoria.

One of my modeling interests is seaplane dolleys/ beaching trolleys. There's a good shot of one.

There's a wealth of detail in this picture. Are they rigging up wind deflectors? There's an officer in the middle who appears to be wearing a WW1 era dress blue visor cap (?).

The "panel" in the background under the speakers is likely for movies. It looks to me like it's recovery operations, what with the line handlers and empty cradle.

A fascinating photo, indeed.  Wish I could pour over the original.

That's a lot of hands on that line for whatever they are going to be rigging.

The officer would be the one khaki at top left.  The smart fellow using his chin strap is likely a Chief, who also had service blue covers.  (Chinstraps on Chief's covers a re black leather.)  But, I'd not be surprised if that chief were actually in Aviation Greens.  

But, that impression will be sore informed by my experience of how small detachments of "brownshoes" will respond to their minority status on a "blackshoe" deployment with ostentatious display of aviation-specific attire.