The U.S. Navy claims that its newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) is the world’s largest. It is the first ship in the Gerald R. Ford class of supercarriers and is designed to accommodate modern systems within its planned 50-year service life. The Gerald R. Ford has a length of 333 meters or about 1,092 feet — slightly shorter than the Icon of the Seas — and a beam of 40.8 meters or almost 134 feet. It also weighs a little less than 100,000 tons. This makes the carrier significantly slimmer and lighter than the cruise ship, but that’s because aircraft carriers need to be as fast as possible.
This ship’s primary mission is to deploy aircraft, but because it has such a short length of just 333 meters (versus the runways at U.S. Air Force bases, with the longest at Edwards Air Force Base with 4,579 meters), carriers use speed to get a brisk wind of over 30 knots blowing over the deck when launching planes, alongside the use of its catapult. The slimmer profile of an aircraft carrier allow it to go faster (which also means that it can get in and out of danger more quickly, too).
As for the price, the Gerald R. Ford class will cost the American taxpayer a cool $13 billion per ship. This is more expensive than the USS Nimitz, which it slated to retire in 2026, and has an inflation-adjusted price of over $11.5 billion.
Is An Aircraft Carrier Bigger Than A Cruise Ship? Here’s How They Compare
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