The Aerial Aircraft Carrier
While hearing the phrase “Aerial Aircraft Carrier” may cause visions of futuristic hovering runways laden with bombers to come to your minds, I am sad to say the closest we have come to this idea yet was quite a disappointment. Both Americans and Russians tried their hands at such a technology due to the relative inefficiency of war planes at the time, air forces were looking for ways to help them travel greater distances. How to accomplish this goal? Putting a bunch of planes on the back of a giant one of course.
The idea was that if the actual flying planes spent less time flying into battle, they would be able to stay up in the air during the battle for a longer time. This logic does indeed make sense on simply a conceptual level, but the implementation could’ve done with some serious alterations. Because of their heavy loads, the aerial aircraft carriers were too heavy to keep flying for extended periods of time, so the same problem was prevalent as before.
Also, because of their large sizes and slow speeds, they were sitting ducks for experienced enemy pilots. Many were shot down before they even had the chance to deploy the planes they bore. So they were quickly recalled and left to obscurity.