From my understanding, naval aircraft in world war 2 tended to be lighter and more maneuverable due to STOL requirements. What’s the reason that post-war jets ended up the opposite – with Banshee, sea venom, panther, demon sea hawk being heavier than land-based contemporaries?

Question

This seems to contrast pretty heavily with the corsair/hellcat/wildcat vs thunderbolt/mustang maneuverability and weight and acceleration.

In: Technology

Answer 1

They took off under their own power in WW2. That meant there were lots of sacrifices in terms of weight that had to be made to make sure they could take off safely.

As the steam catapult was applied to carriers we were able to overcome the obstacle of taking off under a planes own power. This let us dramatically increase the weapons and fuel payload of aircraft. But part of the tradeoff to do that was to make the aircraft more robust so that it could handle the tremendous force applied by the catapult and by the arresting wires when it was launched and recovered respectively.

This [YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRgF4XjcVww) illustrates the landing differences well between the two sorts of aircraft.