Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5230476-20131112061603/@comment-1410838-20140626134600

Strigon 12 wrote: considering B-25 bombers took off from a carrier shorter than a nimitz class carrier in WWII I would assume it could take off from a carrier. These weren't normal B-25s, they were heavily stripped down to make taking off from the Hornet's flight deck possible. Even then, they wouldn't have been able to land back on the carrier afterward because it was too short (hence them continuing west out of Japan and ditching in China). The use of B-25s by Doolittle's Raiders was a one time event because the US Navy didn't have any planes with the range or payload capacity to cause any significant damage to the target area. Use of Navy planes would have meant taking the carriers within a few hundred miles of Japan's coast and risking their loss, which we really couldn't afford as they were critical to victory in the Pacific Theater. And even in their stripped down state, these B-25s wouldn't have been able to land back on the Hornet anyway.

A C-130 Hercules (which is larger and heavier than a B-25) was able to both land on and take off from the USS Forrestal in the 1960s, but like the B-25, it's still too big and heavy for carrier duty.