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Class of American aircraft carriers

The Midway class was a class of three United States Navy aircraft carriers. The lead ship, Midway, was commissioned in September 1945 and decommissioned in 1992. Franklin D. Roosevelt was commissioned in October 1945, and taken out of service in 1977. Coral Sea was commissioned in April 1947, and decommissioned in 1990.

The CVB 41 class vessels (then unnamed) were originally conceived in 1940 as a design study to determine the effect of including an armored flight deck on a carrier the size of the The resulting calculations showed that the effect would be a reduction of air group size—the resulting ship would have an air group of 64, compared to 90 100 for the standard Essex class fleet carriers. As it progressed, the design also became heavily influenced by the wartime experience of the Royal Navy's armored carriers:
As a result of study of damage sustained by various British carriers prior to our entry into the war, two important departures from traditional U. S. Navy carrier design were incorporated in the CVB Class, then still under development. HMS Illustrious in an action off Malta on 1 January 1941 was hit by several bombs, three of which detonated in the hangar space. Large fires swept fore and aft among parked planes thereby demonstrating the desirability of attempting to confine the limits of such explosions and fires by structural sectionalization of the hangar space. On the CVB Class the hangar was therefore divided into five compartments separated by 40 and 50 pound Special Treatment Steel (STS) division bulkheads extending from the hangar deck to the flight deck, each fitted with a large door suitable for handling aircraft. It is hoped that this sectionalization, in conjunction with sprinkler and fog foam systems, will effectively prevent fires from spreading throughout the hangar spaces, as occurred on USS Franklin on 30 October and 19 March. The damage experiences of several British carriers, which unlike our own were fitted with armored flight decks, demonstrated the effectiveness of such armor in shielding hangar spaces from GP bombs and vital spaces below the hangar deck from semi armor piercing (SAP) bombs. Accordingly, the CVB Class was designed with an armored flight deck consisting of 3 1/2 inch STS from frames 46 to 175 with a hangar deck consisting of two courses of 40 pound STS between frames 36 and 192. Although none of the CVB Class carriers were completed in time to take part in war operations, the effectiveness of armored flight decks against Kamikaze attacks was demonstrated by various carriers attached to the British Pacific Fleet |

The concept went to finding a larger carrier that could support both deck armor and a sufficiently large air group. The weight savings needed to armor the flight deck were achieved by removing the planned cruiser caliber battery of guns and reducing the 5 inch antiaircraft battery from dual to single mounts. Unlike the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers, for which the armored deck was part of the ship structure, the Midway class retained their "strength deck" at the hangar deck level and the armored flight deck was part of the superstructure. They would be the last USN carriers to be so designed; the immense size of the succeeding supercarriers would require a new deep hulled design carrying the strength deck at the flight deck level to produce a stronger and lighter hull. The heavily subdivided arrangement of the machinery spaces was based on that of the , while the two inner propeller shafts were partially enclosed in skegs, similar to contemporary battleship construction. While the Essex class carriers had eight main engineering compartments, the Midway class had 26, including twelve boiler rooms well off the centerline and four widely separated engine rooms. More extensive use of electric arc welding than in previous warships reduced the weight by about 10 percent of what would have been required for riveted structural assembly. The resulting Midway class carriers were very large, with the ability to accommodate more planes than any other carrier in the U. S. fleet (30–40 more aircraft than the Essex class). In their original configuration, the Midway class ships had an airwing of up to 130 aircraft. It was soon realized that the coordination of so many planes was beyond the effective command and control ability of one ship. However, their size did allow these ships to more easily accommodate the rapid growth in aircraft size and weight that took place in the early jet age. The forward flight deck was designed for launching 13 ton aircraft; and the aft flight deck was designed for landing 11 ton aircraft, assuming in flight expenditure of fuel and ordnance.

All three of the Midway class made combat deployments in the Vietnam War. Coral Sea deployed to the Gulf of Tonkin six times, Midway deployed on three occasions, and Franklin D. Roosevelt made one combat deployment before returning to the Mediterranean. In the late 1960s, Midway underwent an extensive modernization and reconstruction program under SCB 101.66, which proved to be controversial and expensive and thus was not repeated on the other ships. While $82 million had been budgeted for the modernization, the actual cost was $202 million, in comparison to $277 million for simultaneous construction of the brand new John F. Kennedy. A few months after the campaign, the last of the class left Navy service. Coral Sea was slowly scrapped in Baltimore as legal and environmental troubles continually delayed her fate. Midway spent five years in the mothball fleet at Bremerton, Washington before being taken over by a museum group. The ship is now open to the public as a museum in San Diego, California.