Royal Navy - Fleet Air Arm: News

Could it be adapted to launch Mig29k?

Maybe India could be interested.

MiG-29Ks should be able to operate from it no problem... would benefit if they added a bigger ramp at the front... but the real question would be... why would India pay 6 or 7 billion for an unreliable carrier, when they can make their own for a fraction of that price and the money would be spent in their own economy.

Those SM-2s are the most curious thing.
It is rather a potent missile, and Hessen is the latest in all of Sachsen class

Well that is the thing... the Americans don't normally do good air defence, but in the case of their aircraft carriers and navy they are actually rather good normally.

The Soviets and Russia didn't develop Zircon for fun, it was to penetrate the air defences of the US Navy to destroy aircraft carriers... with enemy AWACS aircraft and interceptor aircraft operating they knew speed would be the only solution because their aircraft and ships and subs couldn't carry enough anti ship missiles to overwhelm a US carrier group with ships and subs and aircraft with anti aircraft missiles in abundance.

Missing a quite big, slow, and high-flying drone with TWO missiles in a row is kinda unusual.
I would blame here some technological solutions that hamper the missile to hit US-operated airplanes.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the Germans are a bit surprised by the fact

Well an IFF system would have meant the missiles wouldn't be fired in the first place, but a secret code/system that prevents solid products from hitting the assets of the US of A is another interesting prospect.

All the Houthies need to do is examine those US drones they shoot down and find any signal system that protects them from US based air defence systems and their missiles will get through every time.

Exactly my point.
I have excluded IFF issue, as it wouldn't allow the plane to be shot at, first of all.

Even if India wanted to buy it the Brits would gut it of electronics and systems it will claim are HATO and super secret... which probably wouldn't matter because they probably aren't very reliable either.

It would need of course to have arrestor wires retrofitted into it and to possibly to have the sky jump (the ramp) modified.

That is funny... I only just noticed that these British carriers are not angled deck carriers... they are more like pocket carriers for the Harrier but scaled up a little.

That makes them even less useful because even with arresting wires you would need to clear the deck before trying to land because if the aircraft misses the cables or the cables break then it will need to be able to takeoff again so the deck would need to be clear to allow that.

Most of the time the hangars carry the aircraft, but when a carrier is operational they keep most of the aircraft on deck so they can be fuelled and armed and launched quickly.

The hangar is only used for repair and when not operating in a war zone so having to clear the deck for landings limits the aircraft carriers performance by a significant margin.

The whole purpose of an angled deck is to allow landings and takeoffs at the same time.