Aircraft carriers are impressive in size but they can still hide from the enemy when necessary. Here’s everything they have to do to stay out of sight.
Aircraft carriers have always been relatively large ships, but today’s carriers are orders of magnitude more massive than the ones that helped the Allies win World War II. In fact, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) is the largest warship ever built, and it routinely has 75+ deadly aircraft, 4,500+ personnel, and a Carrier Strike Group stuffed with support vessels accompanying it wherever it goes. That’s a lot of steel on and under the water, which might make you wonder if an aircraft carrier can hide from the enemy.
It’s a good question to ask because common sense dictates that there’s no way to hide something that weighs over 100,000 tons. That’s without everything else in the water supporting the carrier. Rest assured, an aircraft carrier can hide from the enemy, and it does so using techniques and tactics learned over the decades. The answer to this is actually fairly simple: the carrier stays outside of an enemy ship’s RADAR range, sitting just over the horizon.
