Hi Colin,
Was talking to my nephew, late of the Andrew, while discussing this American flat top, he reminisced about when he was on the Invincible. Apparently they exercised together in the Mediterranean and when it was over, the Americans launched all their aircraft and id a fly by for the Invincible,s crew. He said it was very impressive watching tomcats etc. passing close and at flight deck level, but it was finished they stacked all the aircraft above the USS Theodore Roosevelt in one stack, then it took a very long time to retrieve them at one at a time. He said apparently at the time she carried the equivalent number of planes to the eighth largest Air Force in the world. Another event he remembered was a very large number of B29,s, having flown from the states fly in at about 500ft and carpet bomb a small peninsular of Sardinia then fly back to the States.