Was Bearn dangerously top-heavy?

Was Bearn dangerously top-heavy?

Probably not seriously. Her broad beam, low speed, and heavy battleship hull helped offset the tall conversion, although they did nothing for carrier performance.

Bearn's apparent topweight has to be read against the dimensions and behavior of the underlying hull. Her flight-deck beam was about 35.2 meters, her speed was low, and her deep-load displacement approached 29,000 tons. Those characteristics made severe instability less likely than the silhouette alone suggests. German designers were impressed enough by aspects of Bearn to use her as a reference point while developing Graf Zeppelin, showing how compromised ideas could still travel between navies. The answer is a qualitative judgment rather than a full stability calculation, so it should not be treated as a precise metacentric-height assessment.