Carrier Battle Group

My ship was part of a Carrier Battle Group which escorted us anytime we were deployed to the Arabian Gulf. The Carrier Battle Group consists of:

1 Aircraft Carrier
2 Guided Missile Cruisers
2 Anti Aircraft Warships
1-2 Anti Submarine Destroyers or Frigates.

We never saw any of the ships who were escorting us. They are so far away from our ship, on the outer perimeter, we could not see them with the naked eye. The radar on the USS Harry S Truman (CVN-75) could detect anything within 200 nautical miles with the exception of submarines. Our radar linked to the radar of the other ships in the Battle Group, and therefore, we were able to detect anything coming within 200 nautical miles of the ship on the outermost perimeter of the group.

Here's an interesting observation I made on one of our underways in preparation for deployment. On this particular underway, we were accompanied by the two submarines that were assigned to our battle group. They were doing training exercises and were pinging us with their SONAR. Despite the enormous size of a carrier (as I've said before we're talking 97,0006 tons of steel at a MINIMUM), you could actually hear the SONAR pinging of the steel of the ship's hull It no matter where you were on the ship. It sounds like a little chirping/whirring sound. Every time we heard it, we knew the submarine's SONAR was hitting us.

Jet Engines

For a jet going slower than the speed of sound, the engine is moving through the air at about 1000 km/h (600 mph). We can think of the engine as being stationary and the cold air moving toward it at this speed.
A fan at the front sucks the cold air into the engine.
A second fan called a compressor squeezes the air (increases its pressure) by about eight times. This slows the air down by about 60 percent and it's speed is now about 400 km/h (240 mph).
Kerosene (liquid fuel) is squirted into the engine from a fuel tank in the plane's wing.
In the combustion chamber, just behind the compressor, the kerosene mixes with the compressed air and burns fiercely, giving off hot exhaust gases. The burning mixture reaches a temperature of around 900°C (1650°F).
The exhaust gases rush past a set of turbine blades, spinning them like a windmill.
The turbine blades are connected to a long axle (represented by the middle gray line) that runs the length of the engine. The compressor and the fan are also connected to this axle. So, as the turbine blades spin, they also turn the compressor and the fan.

The hot exhaust gases exit the engine through a tapering exhaust nozzle. The tapering design helps to accelerate the gases to a speed of over 2100 km/h (1300 mph). So the hot air leaving the engine at the back is traveling over twice the speed of the cold air entering it at the front—and that's what powers the plane. Military jets often have an after burner that squirts fuel into the exhaust jet to produce extra thrust. The backward-moving exhaust gases power the jet forward. Because the plane is much bigger and heavier than the exhaust gases it produces, the exhaust gases have to zoom backward much faster than the plane's own speed.

Massive thrust! A Pratt and Whitney F119 jet aircraft engine creates 156,000 newtons (35,000 pounds) of thrust during this US Air Force test in 2002.

http://www.explainthatstuff.com/jetengine.html

Flight Operations

A lot of people probably don't realize a carrier has to be moving in order for a jet to take off. There has to be a certain amount of wind going across the flight deck to aid something as enormous as a jet in taking off. The flight deck must also be level, and that is achieved by filling tanks placed strategically on the bottom of the boat.
One time after flight operations, the tilt of the flight deck was a little too extreme, and one of our jets (with the pilot in it!) rolled across the flight deck and over the side. Fortunately, the jet's nose got caught in the catwalk below which prevented it from dropping 100 feet to the ocean. Once in the water the pilot would have not been able to get out and would have died.