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| Navy Will Sink Retired Carrier America In Explosive Tests | |
| 2005-03-04 | |
WASHINGTON -- The Navy plans to send the retired carrier America to the bottom of the Atlantic in explosive tests this spring, an end that is difficult to swallow for some who served on board the ship, which was based in Norfolk during its 31-year career. The Navy says the effort, which will cost $22 million, will provide valuable data for the next generation of aircraft carriers, which are now in development. No warship this size or larger has ever been sunk, so there is a dearth of hard information on how well a supercarrier can survive battle damage, said Pat Dolan, a spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command.
Since its decommissioning in 1996, the America has been moored with dozens of other inactive warships at a Navy yard in Philadelphia. The Navy's plan is to tow it to sea on April 11 - possibly stopping at Norfolk - before heading to the deep ocean, 300 miles off the Atlantic coast, for the tests, Dolan said. There, in experiments that will last from four to six weeks, the Navy will batter the America with explosives, both underwater and above the surface, watching from afar and through monitoring devices placed on the vessel. These explosions would presumably simulate attacks by torpedoes, cruise missiles and perhaps a small boat suicide attack like the one that damaged the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. At the end, explosive scuttling charges placed to flood the ship will be detonated, and the America will begin its descent to the sea floor, more than 6,000 feet below. The Navy has already removed some materials from the ship that could cause environmental damage after it sinks, Dolan said. Certain aspects of the tests are classified, and neither America's former crew nor the news media will be allowed to view them in person, Dolan said. The Navy does not want to give away too much information on how a carrier could be sunk, she said. Why the America? No other retired supercarriers were available on the East Coast when the test was planned, Dolan said. The others - the Forrestal and the Saratoga - were designated as potential museums, she said. In a letter to Pelletier's group, Adm. John Nathman, the Navy's second-in-command, called America's destruction "one vital and final contribution to our national defense." "Ex-America's legacy will serve as a footprint in the design of future aircraft carriers," he wrote. Although no larger warship has ever been sunk, bigger civilian vessels have gone down. The largest ship in the world, the supertanker Seawise Giant, was sunk by Iraqi warplanes in the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Fully loaded, it displaced more than half a million tons. It was later refloated and renamed. The America, which is more than 1,000 feet long and displaces about 80,000 tons, exceeds the size of the Japanese World War II battleships Yamato and Musashi, and the carrier Shinano, which all displaced close to 70,000 tons. The Yamato and Musashi fell to American warplanes, the Shinano to a U.S. submarine. The America was the third carrier of the non-nuclear Kitty Hawk class, and the first to be retired, a victim of post-Cold War budget cuts. It launched warplanes during the Vietnam War, the 1986 conflict with Libya, the first Gulf War, and over Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s. According to an official Navy Web site, the ship was built by Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Corp. starting in 1961, commissioned in Norfolk in 1965, and decommissioned in Norfolk in 1996. Pelletier and other veterans who served on the America said their farewells in a Feb. 25 ceremony at the ship in Philadelphia. Some artifacts have been removed for museums and veterans' groups; in addition, Pelletier's association will place a time capsule on board. The Navy has several other carriers awaiting their fates. Environmental regulations make breaking warships up for scrap metal largely unprofitable, though some still are dismantled. One smaller World War II carrier, the Oriskany, is scheduled to be sunk as an artificial reef off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., late this year. | |
| Posted by:longtime lurker |
| #8 Sounds like a good MOAB test. |
| Posted by: BH 2005-03-04 11:36:48 PM |
| #7 First, urg, it would have to be the USS Monica, for obvious reasons. Seriously, as a surgeon buries his mistakes, I suspect that the Navy is planning to sink some of theirs. I would not be surprised if, by Navy accounting, entire warehouses of spare parts and equipment go down with the ship. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-03-04 5:52:01 PM |
| #6 Tobor, too bad USS Jimmy Carter is already taken... How about USS {Bill|Hillary} Clinton? |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2005-03-04 5:05:10 PM |
| #5 Perhaps Eason Jordan and Peter Arnett could give us first hand coverage of what it is like to be tied ot the mast of a carrier going down. Have them relate the Yamaguchi experience. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-03-04 4:51:14 PM |
| #4 How about room for one test before scuttling the ship? The Navy could leave one Phalanx CIWS system on board and install a Sea Ram system for effectiveness tests on various anti-ship missile systems (third parties can provide non-US made missiles). Naturally, the ship would not be sunk before removing the machinery being tested. Something near a real-world test should be performed on these systems; during the only opportunity that came about so far (USS Stark), the Stark's Phalanx CIWS supposedly wasn't working correctly. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-03-04 4:31:41 PM |
| #3 They should hold a contest to rename the America before sinking her. The USS Bin Laden? The USS Chirac? The USS John Kerry? The USS Michael Moore? I'm sure my fellow RBers can think of others. |
| Posted by: Tibor 2005-03-04 4:25:12 PM |
| #2 Saratoga is in the center. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-03-04 4:21:01 PM |
| #1 It's gonna take a big boom to sink that carrier, was it the first Saratoga that withstood two near nuclear blasts? |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-03-04 4:17:50 PM |
