This list of aircraft carriers contains aircraft carriers listed alphabetically by name. An aircraft carrier is a warship with a full-length flight deck and facilities for carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering aircraft, that serves as a seagoing airbase. Included in this list are ships which meet the above definition and had an official name italicized or designation non-italicized , regardless of whether they were or were not ordered, laid down, completed, or commissioned.
The two planned Italian carriers Aquila and Sparviero were seized by the Germans after the Italian Armistice but not completed. These were scrapped by Ulyanovsk was scrapped before the Soviet Union was dissolved. The United States Navy is a blue-water navy that is the world's largest navy by tonnage and has the world's largest fleet of nuclear powered aircraft carriers.
Ford -class supercarriers. These carriers serve as the centerpieces and flagships for the Navy's Carrier Strike Groups , with their embarked carrier air wings and accompanying ships and submarines, which strongly contribute to the US ability to project force around the globe. The following is a complete list of all the US Navy's carriers and classes to date, and their status:. These ships were both quicker and cheaper to build than larger fleet carriers and were built in great numbers to serve as a stop-gap measure when fleet carriers were too few.
However, they were usually too slow to keep up with naval task forces and would typically be assigned to amphibious operations, often seen in the Pacific War 's island hopping campaign , or to convoy protection in the war in the Atlantic. While some of these ships were kept for a time in reserve after the war, none survive today, as they have all since been sunk or retired and scrapped.
The following are the classes and stand-alone ships of the US Navy's escort carriers;. The United States Navy also has several full-deck, amphibious assault ships , which are larger than many of the aircraft carriers of other navies today.
