HOW AIRCRAFT CARRIERS WORK

Aircraft carriers aren’t just literally one of the biggest assets for any country’s military, it’s also one of the strongest assets a country’s military can have.

Under international law, an aircraft carrier can legally position themselves 22 kilometres from any country.

The French navy owns one of the most advanced aircraft carriers in the world, and it’s able to launch an aircraft every 30 seconds. It’s also nuclear powered, which means it can literally run for years before it has to 'refuel'.

On advanced American aircraft carriers, you could easily identify what a person’s role is by the colour shirt they wear.

Yellow shirts are in control of navigating aircraft around the deck while blue shirts are assistants to yellow shirts. Red shirts do all the handling and mounting of ammunition, purple shirts manage aircraft fuelling, and green shirts are worn by catapult crews, maintenance people and cargo handlers.

Each aircraft carrier has its own mail address and mail is delivered quite frequently. About 6,000 people live and work aboard these advanced aircraft carriers. 3,200 of those people have jobs related to running the ship itself. This includes the people in charge of keeping the nuclear reactor going, the cleaners keeping the aircraft carrier clean as well as the cooks in charge of preparing meals for the other people onboard.

Many of the people who work below deck can go weeks at a time without seeing the sun. Not quite the idea we had of working on a ship but, then again, this isn’t just your average ship at all.

Today’s advanced aircraft carriers are truly like floating cities and can cruise to almost anywhere in the world.

Watch the Wendover Productions video below for more amazing info on how aircraft carriers work.

Image credit: Fox News