US Navy warship USS Kitty Hawk, the last commissioned conventional-propelled aircraft carrier, embarked on its last voyage on Saturday, leaving Naval Base Kitsap in Bremerton, Washington, to be scrapped in Brownsville, Texas. After 48 years of service, the first-in-class ship was decommissioned in 2009, which put it in mothballs for over a decade before being sold to International Shipbreaking Limited for just one cent in October, as previously reported by an Insider.
The Kitty Hawk has a width of 280 feet and an overall length of more than 1,000 feet, which makes it too large to navigate the Panama Canal. Instead, the ‘Battle Cat’ will board a vessel in the Strait of Magellan, between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, reports The Kitsap Sun. It could take over 130 days to travel around South America, covering roughly 16,000 miles.
The Kitty Hawk was commissioned in 1960 and carried out missions around the world, participating in combat missions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. For a decade, the ship remained the only forward-deployed carrier. Among its notable moments are tests of whether U-2 spy planes could be launched from a carrier, a racial riot, and a collision with a Soviet submarine. It was the last oil-powered US Navy aircraft carrier to be decommissioned. Currently, all US carriers are nuclear-powered.
‘As hard as life was on this ship, it’s part of my history, While most people were graduating from high school and college, I was 30 feet below the waterline, halfway around the world from home’, Corey Urband, who served as a machinist’s mate on the Kitty Hawk in the 1990s, told The Kitsap Sun. The former sailor watched the aircraft carrier leave Bremerton on the weekend. The aircraft carrier is the last of the three ships in the Kitty Hawk class, the other two having been scrapped or scuttled.
Post Your Comments