An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations. They have evolved from wooden vessels used to deploy balloons into nuclear-powered warships that carry dozens of fixed wing and rotary-wing aircraft.
Aircraft carriers are typically treated as the capital ship of a fleet and are extremely expensive to build and important to protect: of the nine nations which possess an aircraft carrier, six of these navies only possess one such ship. There are 20 active aircraft carriers in the world as of June 2011.
Aircraft carrier
Aircraft carrier
Aircraft carrier
Aircraft carrier
Aircraft carrier
Aircraft carrier
