Fleetingly flirting with 'fleet'

General Questions
#1

‘Fleet’, at one time, only meant a group of ships. Then, by extention, it could refer to a group of land vehicles such as taxis, hearses, busses, or garbage trucks. Or airplanes, but definitely moving vehicles.

Some time in the last 10 or 15 years, the use or ‘fleet’ got extended even further to non-moving objects. The only specific uses I’ve seen have been to power plants, especially coal-burning plants, although it could also be gas-burning ones.

So my question is: have you seen any other uses of ‘fleet’ to refer to stationary objects?

#2

Collections of data centres are often referred to as fleets (for example in this article). With “fleet-wide” being a common construction.

#3

Do you mean using fleet as the (group) head noun in a phrase like “FLEET of X”?
The BYU corpus shows these are the most frequent uses in that construction, 1 being most frequent.

|1| SHIPS|
|2| CARS|
|3| TRUCKS|
|4| VEHICLES|
|5| WARSHIPS|
|6| PLANES|
|7| BUSES|
|8| BOATS|
|9| HELICOPTERS|
|10| DRONES|
|11| POLICE CARS/VEHCLES|
|12| JETS|
|13| AUTOMOBILES|
|14| LIMOUSINES|
|15| STARSHIPS|
|16| TRACTORS|
|17| BIKES|
|18| ROBOTS|
|19| SATELLITES|
|20| CABS|
|21| AMBULANCES|
|22| BALLOONS|
|23| ROCKETS|
|24| SUBMARINES|
|25| TAXIS|
|26| VANS|
|27| VESSELS|
|28| WORLDS|
|29| FRIGATES|
|30| CANOES|
|31| DRIVERS|
|32| COACHES|
|33| AIRPLANES|
|34| PLANTS|
|35| REACTORS|
|36| SAILBOATS|
|37| YACHTS|
|38| BATTLESHIPS|
|39| CARRIERS|
|40| FIGHTERS|

So yes, less frequently, it shows plants, as well as reactors. There are also less frequent uses of fleet of casinos. A random Google search shows things like fleet of outlets, fleet of stores, etc. Really, it’s for any collective reference to all the installations of a single operation. I think this is not so new, going back more than 15 years.

It shows some occurrences of fleet of nannies (2012 and 2013), and henchmen at least once (2017)–don’t know if you consider people “stationary.” I think the idea of using it for people is to convey that they are mobile, so that probably doesn’t fit what you’re looking for.

#4

“Fleet” seems the standard collective term for all of the power plants of a certain type belonging to a single country or company in middle-brow journalistic writing. E.g., Japan’s fleet of nuclear reactors or PG&E’s fleet of gas-fired power plants. My memory is that this usage is relatively recent, probably since the 1990s, but I’m not at all certain about that. It definitely seems to currently be the standard term used by staff writers for The Economist and contributors to Foreign Affairs.

I don’t think I’ve seen it used in other contexts for referring to anything other than vehicles.

#5

Not fleeting then?

ETA: Oops, I’d forgotten the thread title exhausted the range of bad puns already…

#6

Just throwing in that a closely related metaphor, that of “flagship” as referring to the most outstanding item in a series of things, is very widely used. A company can have a flagship product, a TV network a flagship show, a retailer a flagship store, etc. This usage seems to be older than the proliferation of “fleet”.

#7

Fleet enemas