Conceived at the end of World War II and commissioned just after it, the Midway-class—Midway, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Coral Sea—were the U.S. Navy’s first “big deck” carriers with armored flight ...

For roughly 100 years, the aircraft carrier has sailed the open ocean. The ship began to take shape in the early 1900s, and the United States' first operational carrier, the USS Langley, launched in ...

Conceived before Pearl Harbor and mass-produced during World War II, the Essex-class carriers gave the U.S. Navy a scalable, resilient flight-deck that could launch bigger air groups, absorb damage, ...