thumb|Franklin D. Roosevelt under way in 1969
The Midway class was a class of three United States Navy aircraft carriers. The lead ship, , was commissioned in September 1945 and decommissioned in 1992. was commissioned in October 1945, and taken out of service in 1977. was commissioned in April 1947, and decommissioned in 1990.
History
1940s
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:
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.
1960s
All three of the Midway class made combat deployments in the Vietnam War. deployed to the Gulf of Tonkin six times, deployed on three occasions, and 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 . A few months after the campaign, Midway was decommissioned.
Coral Sea was slowly scrapped at 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 at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, California.
Ships in class
{| class="sortable wikitable plainrowheaders"
! scope="col" | Name
! scope="col" | Hull no.
! scope="col" | Builder
! scope="col" | Laid down
! scope="col" | Launched
! scope="col" | Commissioned
! scope="col" | Decommissioned
! scope="col" | Fate
|-
! scope="row" |
| <br><br>
| Newport News Shipbuilding and Dockyard Co., Newport News
| 27 October 1943
| 20 March 1945
| 10 September 1945
| 11 April 1992
| Museum ship at San Diego
|-
! scope="row" | ()
| <br><br>
| New York Naval Shipyard, New York City
| 1 December 1943
| 29 April 1945
| 27 October 1945
| 30 September 1977
| Broken up at Kearny, 1978
|-
! scope="row" |
| <br><br>
| rowspan=4|Newport News Shipbuilding and Dockyard Co., Newport News
| 10 July 1944
| 2 April 1946
| 1 October 1947
| 26 April 1990
| Broken up at Baltimore, 2000
|-
! scope="row" | unnamed
| CVB-44
| colspan="5" | Cancelled 11 January 1943
|-
! scope="row" | unnamed
| CVB-56
| colspan="5" rowspan="2" | Cancelled 28 March 1945
|-
! scope="row" | unnamed
| CVB-57
|}
Hull codes;
- CV – Fleet/Multi-purpose carrier
- CVA – Attack carrier
- CVB – Large carrier
See also
- List of aircraft carriers
- List of aircraft carriers of the United States Navy
- Naval aviation