U.S. Navy Organization and Composition – Episode 3: Aircraft Carriers and Aircraft

Zero to about 160 miles an hour in roughly two seconds, every day at sea an American aircraft carrier can launch more than a hundred combat sorties like this one. Bring them home again onto a runway that is moving, pitching and only about a thousand feet long. In this final episode of the series, we go aboard the aircraft carrier, the largest warship ever built, and meet every aircraft the Navy flies, from fighters and jammers to submarine hunters, tankers and trainers, along with the weapons they carry. It began in 1922, when the Navy converted a coal ship into its first carrier, USS Langley, nicknamed the Covered Wagon. Twenty years later, at the Battle of Midway, carriers sank four Japanese carriers in a single day without the fleets ever seeing each other, and the age of the battleship ended. In 1961 came USS Enterprise, the world's first nuclear-powered carrier, which served for over half a century. The United States has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, far more than any other nation. No other Navy has more than three. The law requires the Navy to keep at least 11. Each is a floating air base, a nuclear power plant, and a small city of 5,000 people, all in one hull. Ten of them belong to the Nimitz class. USS Nimitz was commissioned in 1975, and the last, USS George H.W. Bush, in 2009. Each displaces about 100,000 tons, is nearly 1,100 feet long, and has a flight deck covering four and a half acres. Two nuclear reactors drive four propeller shafts and push the ship at more than 30 knots, and they need refueling only once in the ship's 50-year life. That refueling, in the middle of the ship's life, is a complex overhaul that takes years. USS John C. Stennis has been in hers at Newport News since 2021 and is running well behind schedule. USS Nimitz herself was supposed to retire in May 2026 after more than 50 years of service. Instead, the Navy kept her for 10 more months until March 2027 so that the fleet does not drop below 11 carriers before her replacement arrives. In March 2026, she sailed from Washington State around South America to Norfolk on her final voyage. The replacement is the Gerald R. Ford-class, the first new carrier design in more than 40 years. On the outside, Ford looks similar to a Nimitz. Inside, almost everything is new. Steam catapults are replaced by EMALS, the electromagnetic aircraft launch system, which uses linear electric motors to throw aircraft off the deck more smoothly. Advanced arresting, gear catches them using energy-absorbing water turbines and motors. New reactors produce about three times the electrical power, and an island moved further aft frees up deck space. The Navy says a Ford can generate a third more sorties than a Nimitz, with about 600 fewer sailors. All that new technology came with years of problems. The catapults, arresting gear and new bomb elevators all failed tests early on, and the first ship cost about $13.3 billion, but Ford is now proven. In 2025 and 2026, she made a 326-day deployment, the longest by an American carrier in more than 50 years. That one deployment covered two wars. Sent to the Caribbean in November 2025, Ford supported the operation that captured Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, in January 2026. Then she crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to join the strikes on Iran, before coming home to Norfolk in May. Three more Fords are coming. The second, John F. Kennedy, began sea trials in January 2026 and is due in March 2027, two years late. Then come Enterprise and Doris Miller, named for the African-American mess attendant who manned a machine gun at Pearl Harbor, due around 2032. A fifth is planned. A carrier's crew is really two crews. About 3,000 sailors run the ship, its reactors, its deck, its weapons, and its galleys. Another 2,000 or so belong to the air wing, which flies and fixes the aircraft. Add the staff of the strike group Admiral, and more than 5,000 people are aboard. A carrier is a city at sea. Its galleys serve around 18,000 meals a day. Its distillers turn seawater into hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water every day. It has its own hospital and dentists, a post office with its own zip code, a television station, a barber shop, a chapel, and a jail. The flight deck is one of the most dangerous workplaces in the world. On a Nimitz-class carrier, four catapults launch aircraft from the bow and the angled deck. A jet is hooked to the catapult shuttle, the blast deflector rises behind it, the pilot goes to full power and salutes, and the catapult officer touches the deck. Two seconds later, the jet is flying. Landing is even harder. Pilots fly down a glide slope guided by a light system called the meatball, while landing signal officers watch every approach. A hook on the jet's tail must catch one of three steel arresting wires stretched across the deck, which stops a jet doing about 150 miles an hour within around 300 feet. If the hook misses, the pilot is already at full power to fly off and try again. At night, in rough seas, this is one of the hardest things any pilot can do. Navy pilots are graded on every single landing, and when things go wrong, they go wrong fast. In the Red Sea in 2024 and 2025, the carrier Harry S. Truman lost three Super Hornets, one shot down by mistake by an American cruiser, one that rolled off the hangar deck during a hard turn, and one that went over the side after a failed landing. Below the flight deck is the hangar bay, where aircraft are repaired, connected to the flight deck by four huge elevators. Below that are the magazines, holding thousands of bombs and missiles, which are raised to the flight deck by weapons elevators. A carrier also defends itself, with Sea Sparrow missiles, Rolling Airframe missiles and Phalanx guns. But its real protection is its escorts, its air wing, and its ability to move 500 miles in a day But a carrier's too vulnerable. China has built missiles designed to kill them, such as the DF-21D and DF-26, ballistic missiles with maneuvering warheads that can reportedly hit a moving ship more than 1,500 kilometers away. Critics say a 100,000-ton, $13 billion ship is too big a target. The Navy answers that carriers are moving, hard to find, and protected by layers of defenses, and that in 2026, carriers fought for months within range of Iranian missiles without being hit. The aircraft on a carrier belonged to a carrier air wing. The navy has nine. A typical air wing in 2026 has about 65 to 70 aircraft in nine squadrons and detachments. At its heart are four strike fighter squadrons with about 44 jets, Super Hornets, and in more and more air wings, F-35C Lightning IIs. Then come one squadron of EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets, one of E-2D Hawkeye radar planes, two of Seahawk helicopters, and a detachment of CMV-22B Ospreys for cargo. Soon the MQ-25 Stingray drone tanker will join them. F/A-18E and F Super Hornet is the backbone of naval aviation. The E has one seat, the F has two. It flies it up to about Mach 1.6, carries up to around 18,000 pounds of weapons on 11 stations, and has a 20mm Gatling gun in the nose. The Navy has around 500 of them. The newest, Block 3, adds a large touchscreen cockpit, better networking, and an airframe rated for 10,000 flight hours. Boeing will deliver the very last Super Hornet in early 2027 and close the production line in St. Louis. Super Hornets do more than fight. With a refueling pod under the belly, one Super Hornet can pass fuel to another, and on a typical carrier, as many as a quarter of all Super Hornet flights are tanker missions. That wears out jets and pilots, which is exactly why the Navy wants the MQ-25 drone tanker. The F-35 Sea Lightning II is the carrier version of the stealth fighter. It has bigger wings and a stronger landing gear than the Air Force version for catapult launches and arrested landings and carries its weapons inside two internal bays to stay hidden from radar. The Navy had about 72 at the end of 2025 and plans to buy 273. The F-35C went to war for the first time in November 2024, when jets from the Abraham Lincoln struck Houthi targets in Yemen. By 2026, F-35C squadrons were flying in the opening waves of the strikes on Iran, using their stealth to go first, find air defenses, and pass targets to the Super Hornets behind them. The EA-18G Growler looks like a two-seat Super Hornet, but its job is electronic warfare. It carries large jamming pods under its wings to blind enemy radars and anti-radiation missiles that home in on radar signals. The Navy has about 153. The new next-generation jammer pod is now replacing the old ALQ-99. The E-2D Advanced Hawkeye is the air wing's eyes. A 24-foot rotating radar dome on its back can track aircraft and missiles hundreds of miles away, and its crew of five directs fighters to targets. The newest can be refueled in flight. The Navy has about 65 and wants 86. For carrier onboard delivery, bringing mail, spare parts and passengers to the ship, the Navy now flies the CMV-22B Osprey, a tiltrotor that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like a plane. It can carry the power module of an F-35 engine, which no other aircraft could bring aboard. It replaced the C-2A Greyhound, which made its final flight on 28 July 2026, after 60 years of service. The MH-60R Seahawk is the Navy's submarine hunter. It lowers a dipping sonar into the sea to listen for submarines, drop sonobuoys, and attacks with torpedoes. It also carries Hellfire missiles and laser-guided rockets against small boats and drones. About 270 are in service, flying from carriers, destroyers, and cruisers. The MH-60S is the utility version, search and rescue, combat rescue, moving cargo between ships, carrying seals and hunting mines. It can be armed with Hellfires, rockets, and machine guns in the doors. The Navy has about 256. The MQ-25 Stingray will be the first unmanned aircraft to operate routinely from a carrier deck. It is a flying fuel tank, designed to refuel fighters so Super Hornets no longer have to do the job The first production aircraft flew in April 2026, but it will not be ready to deploy until 2029. The Navy plans 76. And the future, on the 29th of September 2026, the Pentagon chose Boeing to build the F-AXX, the Navy's sixth-generation fighter, to replace the Super Hornet in the 2030s. It will fly with drone wingmen, known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft, Which the Navy is also starting to develop. Not all naval aviation flies from carriers. The P-8A Poseidon, built on a Boeing 737 airliner, is the Navy's long-range submarine hunter and maritime patrol aircraft. It carries more than 100 sonobuoys, Mark 54 torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles and is being cleared to carry the LISM. The Navy has about 126 and in 2027 asked for 12 more. Flying alongside it is the MQ-4C Triton, a huge high-altitude drone based on the Global Hawk, which can patrol the ocean for more than a day at a time, scanning millions of square miles. A handful are in service, with 27 planned. One of the Navy's most important aircraft is one you rarely see. The E6B Mercury, based on the Boeing 707, carries the TACAMO mission, Take Charge and Move Out. In a nuclear war, it would relay launch orders to the ballistic missile submarines using a very low-frequency radio with a trailing antenna miles long. Its replacement, the E-130J, based on the C-130J Hercules, was delivered to the Navy for conversion on 15 October 2026. The Navy also flies transports. The C-40A Clipper, another 737, and C-130 Hercules, moving people and parts around the world. The MH-53E Sea Dragon, a giant three-engine minesweeping helicopter, is flying its last missions and will retire by 2027. The most famous Navy aircraft of all may be the six blue and gold Super Hornets of the Blue Angels, the flight demonstration squadron since 1946, supported by their own C-130J, nicknamed Fat Albert. To train its pilots to fight, the Navy keeps its own enemy air force, F-5 Tigers and F-16s painted in foreign camouflage, flown by instructors at the Navy's Fighter Weapons School, better known as TOPGUN. And to make pilots in the first place, it runs a training command. Students start in the T-6B Texan II turboprop. Future jet pilots move to the T-45C Goshawk, a jet trainer that can land on carriers. The Navy plans to buy 216 new jets to replace it, with a winner expected in 2027. Multi-engine students fly the new T-54A and helicopter students the TH-73A Thrasher. It takes about two years to earn navy wings of gold. The Marine Corps flies its own aircraft from navy ships too, F-35B and F-35C jets, MV-22 Ospreys, CH-53K King Stallions, and attack helicopters. Marine squadrons regularly fly from carriers as part of navy air wings, but that is a story for the Marine Corps series. Now the weapons. A carrier air wing can carry almost every kind of air-launched weapon in the American arsenal. Let's start with air-to-air. For close-in fights, the AIM-9X Sidewinder is a heat-seeking missile that can be aimed just by looking at a target through the pilot's helmet sight, and can turn to hit targets far off the jet's nose. For longer range, the AIM-120D AMRAAM is a radar-guided missile with a range well over 100 kilometers. And for the longest range, the Navy now has the AIM-174B, an air-launched version of the SM-6 ship missile. It is the longest-range air-to-air missile in American service, designed to kill enemy tankers and radar planes from hundreds of kilometers away. It was first seen on Super Hornets in 2024. Fighters still carry guns. The Super Hornet has an M61 20mm Gatling gun that fires 6,000 rounds a minute. The F-35C carries a 25mm gun in a pod under its belly. For striking ground targets, the most used weapons are guided bombs. The JDAM kit turns an ordinary 500, 1,000 or 2,000-pound bomb into a satellite-guided weapon accurate to a few meters. Laser-guided Paveway bombs and laser JDAMs can hit moving targets. The GBU-53B Stormbreaker is a small, 250-pound glide bomb with a three-mode seeker that can find and hit moving vehicles in bad weather from more than 70 kilometers away. For standoff attacks from beyond enemy air defenses, the Navy uses the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon. A glide bomb that can fly more than 100 km and the SLAM-ER, a missile that can be steered by the pilot right up to impact. To destroy enemy air defenses, Growlers and Hornets carry the AGM-88E AARGM, a missile that homes in on radar signals. Its successor, the AGM-88G AARGM-IA, flies roughly twice as far and fits inside the F-35's weapon bays. It entered production in 2026. To sink ships, Super Hornets carry the Harpoon, and now the AGM-158C LRASM, a stealthy long-range anti-ship missile that can find and pick out its own target in a crowded fleet, hundreds of kilometers away. And for the cheapest ship killer of all, there is Quickstrike, a 2,000-pound JDAM with a new seeker, which hits a moving ship right at the waterline and breaks it apart, at a fraction of the cost of a missile. Aircraft also lay naval mines. The Quick-Strike family turns standard bombs into seabed mines, and a newer version with wings can glide them into place from tens of kilometers away. Against submarines, helicopters and P-8s drop the Mark 54 lightweight torpedo. The P-8 can also release it from high altitude with a glide kit called HAWC, which lets the plane stay high and out of danger. Helicopters carry Hellfire missiles and APKWS laser-guided rockets, which proved to be a cheap way to shoot down drones. In the Red Sea and over Iran, American aircraft fired them at drones worth tens of thousands of dollars instead of missiles costing millions. The Air Wing's weapons are expensive. A single AIM-120D costs over a million dollars, an LISM around 3-4 million and an AIM-174B several million. A JDAM kit costs tens of thousands. That price gap is why the Navy is so interested in cheap guided bombs like Quickstrike and in laser guided rockets against drones, which have become the most common targets of modern naval warfare. In 2026, these weapons were used on a huge scale. During Operation Epic Fury, the Abraham Lincoln Strike Group alone flew 3,693 combat sorties and dropped about 620 tons of ordnance, while its jets and ships shot down 77 attack drones and 21 anti-ship missiles. So that's the United States Navy, about 340,000 sailors and nearly 300 ships, from the frigate to the battleship that may one day join them, submarines that can stay hidden for months, and 11 aircraft carriers, each carrying more air power than most of the world's air forces. It is a fleet built to control the sea anywhere on Earth, and in 2026 it spent the year doing exactly that. Thanks for watching this series on the United States Navy.