Fun times

Government math is full of surprises!

The Aussies already gave the Chicoms a working flight deck when they sold them the Melbourne for scrapping.

My neighbor was the XO on that ship back in the 70s.

Odds are we will never have a supercarrier museum ship now since making a nuke powered carrier a museum is damn near impossible.

Especially since mixed scrap metal prices are $0.07/pound if you take it to Gershow or PK metal.
You would think we would make the recycler pay at least that much - they'll still profit from cutting it apart & sorting it.

MARDET 86-88.  Rode her around the world from San Diego to Philadelphia.  

Sad.  I built a model of her back in the mid 80s, and spent many hours playing on the floor while watching Top Gun and The Final Countdown.  My older brother had the Enterprise, then later on I got the Nimitz and he got the Carl Vinson to add to our collections.  Got to walk on/through her back in the late 80s when she was in San Diego (?).

Waste of steel, besides it has been done to death.

"Screw you, FAA - and screw you, EPA, too!"

Unfortunately these types of ramp strikes, while not frequent are not that all uncommon either.

This was explained earlier in the thread.

These ships, especially of this era, are loaded with asbestos, lead paint, and other materials that are toxic or hazardous and need special abatement procedures. The government is basically washing its hands of that and putting it on the private scrapping company. The company is also paying for the transport of the ship. Of course the company will make money, otherwise what's the point of it existing and how would it stay in business? Right now it'll make more money due to the price of scrap, but when this deal was done those prices were lower. This time the private company came out further ahead.

What was all based at San Diego North Island say, back in 1987? Was really neat to look from the hotel's restaurant and across the bay and see the aircraft carriers docked.

I graduated Sea School in October 86 and they moved us to overnight at a barracks at NAS NI.  The next day, wearing Alphas, they loaded us into a CH-46 and flew us out to the Kitty Hawk.  An awe inspiring sight, indeed.

At the time she was working up for her World Cruise '87.  After holiday leave period we got underway shortly after the New Year.  

You want Kitty Hawk sea stories?  Hell yes!  I'm glad you asked!

One night during pre-deployment work ups they called "man overboard".  A frantic 15 minutes later it was determined that an inexperienced sailor, working on the flight deck at night, had run across the path of an S3 Viking that was on a cat stroke.  He hit the right side of the airplane, then got sucked down the engine.  They found bloody pieces of his life vest and a few other chunks.  

We were transiting the Pacific on deployment enroute to PI and it was a dark and stormy night.  It was my first experience feeling the ship move, and move she did.  Flight ops had been suspended but then Captain D.W. Hoffman ("Hang'em High Hoffman" if you went to captain's mast) came on the 1MC and announced that they were tracking Big Bulge radars inbound to the battle group.  Ivan was coming to pay a visit, and we couldn't let that go unanswered.  The next call over the 1MC was for flight quarters and then, "Launch the alert fighters!"  I was on roving patrol in a passageway when the Tomcat guys went running to man their planes.  I recall the look of utter determination on their faces, but their look also betrayed more than a little consternation.  It was a dark and stormy night, the ship was moving and we were in blue water...there would be no field diverts if they couldn't get back aboard. Not long after I saw them scrambling the ship shuddered "Thump-Thump"  and two Tomcats went off the pointy end hauling ass to greet the Bears.  

A few minutes after the Tomcats went aloft the 1MC announced, "Launch the alert Viking!  Launch the Viking!"  It seems that Ivan was testing how ready an American CVBG would be in the storm conditions and was trying to slip a nuclear attack submarine in on us while were were dealing with the Bears.  An S3 went up and soon sonar pings were bouncing through the Hawk's hull.  We were told that the attack submarine assigned to our battle group saddled in behind Ivan and just pinged his ass mercilessly.  

This was the time that the fucking Iranians were putting Silk Worm anti-ship missiles at the Straits of Hormuz, so we had to haul ass to Gonzo station.  (It's funny, before getting underway there were rumors of Australia.  Then the fucking Persians pulled their bullshit )  Enroute to the PI we passed through the Bonin Islands.  Captain Hoffman came on the 1MC and announced that there was a great view of Iwo Jima, and that the MARDET had the privilege of the bridge if we wanted to look.   Only two of us took him up on his offer, myself and a kid named Duncan.  We hauled ass to the bridge and got a great view of what I referred to as the "dominant terrain feature" on the island....Mt. Suribachi.  Bears were inbound again and I will forever remember the silhouette of a Tomcat reefed into a tight right turn with Mt. Suribachi beneath its wing.

We ploughed a lot of holes in the water fucking with the Iranians.  We were out there for a LONG as time (wiki says 106 days).  At some point we were granted a "steel beach" and the ship anchored off Masirah Island.  Anchored not far from us was a Russian Krivak that had been shadowing us for some time.  Early one morning while at anchor I heard a voice over the 1MC quietly announce, "Fire, fire, fire!  There's a fire in hangar bay one.  Away the special fire fighting party."  I thought that was kind of odd because I would have expected an announcement like that to be loud and accompanied by a call to general quarters.  I reasoned though that if that maybe guard mount would be cancelled if there were a fire in hangar bay one.  Not a minute later the GQ alarm sounded and we were off to the races!

SOP for the MARDET was to station Marines down certain scuttles to guard certain hatches during GQ.   The last of those Marines had been armed and departed the guard shack just as I arrived.  (Frankly, my enthusiasm at the prospect of being that far below a weather deck when the ship was afire was minimal.  I think they gave us an emergency escape breathing device, but I can't recall.)  Anyway, with nothing else to do I sat in the rec area waiting to see what would happen next.  And what happened next was that bridge duress alarm would go off!  I was armed with an 870 and was part of a four man team under LCPL Davis to get to the bridge ASAP and repel boarders or whatever the fuck was going on up there.  We shot up our ladder well and Davis made a hard right to go up another the ladder into....hangar bay one where the fire was.  I yelled, "We can't go that way, there's a fire!" but Davis, God love him, just wasn't going to depart from SOP.  I waited at the bottom of the ladder, and shortly there after the crew came back down and we went up the alternate route to the bridge, along the port side passage.

Security alerts were about the only thing that made life on a MARDET worthwhile.  The sailors were all supposed to hit the deck when we were coming through, and if they didn't no one blinked an eye when we put them there.  (From Sea School.  "First, it is for their safety.  Second, it is because they need to be trained how to respond.  Third, we're Marines and we like to do that sort of thing.")  Well, previous alerts didn't have sailors clogging the passageways around repair lockers, putting on their fire fighting gear.  Davis started forearm shivering the shit out of some poor squid that was putting on gear while his friends were trying to pull him away.  I grabbed Davis, who was a bit wild eyed, by the collar and calmly said to him, "Dude, the SHIP IS ON FIRE!  Now is not the time for that shit!  These guys have got a job to do."  

We eventually made our way to the bridge and announced our arrival, much to the surprise of the officer of the deck and bridge crew that were coming to grips with what was turning out to be a fairly nasty fire.  (We discovered later that when they went to GQ and put on their helmets someone dropped a helmet on the foot pedal.)    Anyway about then Captain Tillotson arrived on the bridge.  (Hoffman had been relieved early.  D.W. was something of a screamer that did not suffer fools of any rank.  I can't speak to that, but he loved his Marines.)  It was amazing to see a man of that capability sift through a shitstorm and make things happen.  He took stock of the situation and ordered the OOD to get the ship underway and get the wind off the port beam.  He ordered the commo to send a message to SURFLANT to inform that that the Hawk was on fire and that more information would be coming shortly.  He took damage control reports, and kept the ship informed.  It was an amazing performance.

I got sunburned to a crisp transiting the Suez Canal.  Minimal liberty in the Med and then transatlantic to 'Murica.  During that part of the voyage we were holding guard mount in the hangar bay, with the doors open.  The Atlantic was a LOT rougher than the Pacific and Med, and as we stood there we were treated with views of the sky.  And then the water.  And then the sky.  It wasn't three minutes before be first Marine projectile puked, followed by several others.  The MSgt told us to just "get below!"  

That was my Kitty Hawk.  I didn't appreciate what an adventure that really was at the time.  

Farewell and following seas, Battlecat!

... wrong thread...

Why can't they just go around the Keys and into the Gulf?  Texas is right there.

Yeah they can just put wheels under it! What's wrong with them?

Because it isn't on the east coast.

Perhaps Taiwan could find a use for her.

That was my old ship. Boiler Tech 4 main machinery room.

Most likely an empty hulk. Same for the SS United States.

Not empty.  She was kept in reserve for recommissioning if needed.  However, she has most likely been stripped of useful equipment now but still not an empty hulk.  Lots of boilers, engines, generators, motors, etc. still aboard.

Google Earth image from a few years back showing a couple of Forrestal class carriers being scrapped in Brownsville.  That hull that's scrapped down to the waterline that is stern-to-stern with one carrier may be the remains of a third carrier.

Left carrier is SARATOGA.  Right one might be INDEPENDENCE but I can't make out the second number of the hull number.  It kind of looks like it might be a 2 but I can't tell for sure.  If it's a 1, it's RANGER, or the ENTERPRISE from Star Trek IV.

There was an effort to save her and berth her next to USS North Carolina.  But after ten years of work there was a death in the leadership of the effort and that effort fell apart.

No one else wanted to pick up the torch and the Navy determined that Kitty Hawk had become too degraded to economically restore to museum condition.  So the order for scrapping was issued.

This guy is silly.

I think there are still a lot of secrets in the design and construction of our Super carriers.  They are supposed to be damn hard to sink.

"Excuse me.  I'm looking for the nooclear wessels."

I went back and checked.  The image I posted is 08/15.  If you look west from here, it turns out that USS Constellation was there also at the same time.  I think the ship in question is Ranger.  Wikipedia says that Independence was scrapped in 2017.  There's another Forrestal class that shows up in Brownsville around 08/17 but the image is distorted so the deck is unreadable.  Weird that most of the carriers were scrapped within months but Saratoga took them several years to finish her.

My dads…

I got a copper coin made from the USS Constellation a few years ago from their eBay account. They had squadron doors and other cool stuff. Some of it you had to pick up due to weight.