Furious is often credited with roughly 36 aircraft, though carrier totals depend on what a navy chooses to count. Some services included disassembled machines, airframes hung from hangar ceilings, or aircraft distributed through maintenance spaces, while British figures concentrated on the active air group. British carriers could still hold enough spare parts and components to blur the boundary between stores and another usable airframe. Secrecy and the Royal Navy's wartime approach to carrier information make exact capacity harder to reconstruct. Headline air-group numbers can mislead unless the comparison accounts for national rules and the ship's real maintenance resources.
Notable Point · 30:41-32:50
Why carrier aircraft totals are difficult to compare
Furious's roughly 36-aircraft figure shows how different accounting rules can obscure the difference between an operational air group and total airframe capacity.