Scrapped, sunk or saved. That’s what the future holds for all aircraft carriers.
But not all carriers are scrapped the same, not all are sunk the same, and most definitely,
not all are saved the same! This is the story of how carriers are built, and their ultimate fate.
Of course, some carriers were reincarnated,
and some pursued a career in arts and hospitality, but it’s Not What You Think!
Aircraft carriers are the largest and some of the most expensive military vehicles in the world.
What tens of thousands of sailors call “home”, costs
billions of dollars to build, and it all begins with a cut!
The first cut of steel ceremony marks one of the first major milestones in the life of a ship.
The steel is usually signed by the sponsor and other stakeholders, and then a piece of it is cut.
This is NOT a scene from the second Season of Squid Game! It’s the next major milestone,
called keel laying. The signature of the sponsor is welded onto a sheet of steel,
and the first piece of the keel is moved to drydock.
From that point on, different sections of the carrier are built, for example the rudders are
poured into molds, and other sections of the ship are manufactured and then put together,
piece by piece, like the flight deck, the bow, and the island. The island installation ceremony
follows the tradition of placing coins and other valuables under the island to be crushed.
Everything else like catapults, radars and electronics,
elevators, life rafts and so on need to be installed and inspected as well.
When the time comes, the dry dock is filled with water to float the ship.
Forward to the christening ceremony,
where thousands of people come to see a bottle of Champagne
broken on the bow of the ship for good luck. You can drink the champagne too, if you wish!
The ship then has to undergo sea trials to make sure it’s fit to enter service.
This includes testing the design, equipment, and other ship specific systems to ensure that they
work properly and can handle the equipment that they will be using in the future.
For a carrier, sea trials include anything from testing the propulsion system and anchors,
to conducting basic flight tests with aircraft that will be assigned to the ship.
And of course, there are the shock trials, to see how well the carrier can handle nearby
underwater explosions. Any deficiencies need to be addressed before the ship can be commissioned,
after which the ship will report to its home port to become an active unit of the navy. Fast forward
anywhere from a few years to a few decades of active service, and it’s time to retire.
The final retirement destination for most aircraft carriers is scrapyards. Once decommissioned,
the carriers usually become part of the “Mothball Fleet”, which is another name
for the reserve fleet. These ships are kept afloat and sufficiently working so that they
can be quickly reactivated in an emergency, as happened at the beginning of the Korean war.
But eventually most of the reserve fleet end up in shipbreaking facilities. The US Navy has
historically sold the carriers to shipbreakers for a dollar or a penny, to then be broken apart
and recycled. But the carriers need to make a final trip to these shipbreaking facilities.
For example, USS Kitty Hawk, had to be towed from Bremerton on the west coast of the United States,
all the way down, around the tip of South America, and then back up to Texas, where the shipbreaker
was, a 16,000 miles voyage [26,000km]. Another example is USS Bennington which was commissioned
in 1944 and decommissioned in 1970. More than 20 years after her decommissioning,
she was eventually sold for scrap, and was then towed across the Pacific to a scrapyard in India.
Speaking of India, this is INS Vikrant, India’s first aircraft carrier.
After her decommissioning in 1997, she became a museum ship but was eventually
scrapped in 2014. But in February of 2016, she was reincarnated of sorts, when Bajaj unveiled
a new motorbike made with metal from Vikrant's scrap and named it Bajaj V in honor of Vikrant.
When it comes to sunken aircraft carriers, there are quite a few that were sunk in battle.
For example, in 1945, USS Bismarck Sea sank off of Iwo Jima due to two Japanese kamikaze attacks,
which killed 318 crewmen. She was the last aircraft carrier in US service that
was sunk due to enemy action. Numerous Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk during WWII as well,
many of which were hit by torpedoes launched from American submarines.
But even during peacetime, there are examples of aircraft carriers that were sunk,
either for military purposes, or for recreation! Let me explain.
Sometimes militaries can kill two birds with one stone:
test out modern weapons on real target ships to see how well the weapons work,
while disposing of the decommissioned warships at the same time.
There are plenty of examples of all types of warships being used as target ships, where they
are hit and sunk by torpedoes and missiles. But when it comes to American aircraft carriers, there
are only two examples that were sunk as target ships. The most recent one was in 2005, when USS
America was used as a target for almost 4 weeks, but the only declassified footage is this photo.
The other example goes back to 1946.
In that exercise, the weapon was much bigger than the targets.
We are referring to Operation Crossroads, where the United States exploded a pair of nuclear bombs
at Bikini Atoll with the purpose of investigating the effect of nuclear weapons on warships.
Out of the 95 target ships, 2 were aircraft carriers. USS Independence and USS Saratoga.
Saratoga sank after the second explosion,
and it’s not surprising, once you see how close the ship was to the underwater nuclear explosion.
When it comes to recreation, USS Oriskany was the first US warship slated to become
an artificial reef. In May of 2006, a Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal team from Florida
detonated 500lbs of C-4 explosive charges inside the carrier, sinking it in the Gulf of Mexico.
It is now one of the top ten wreck diving sites in the world, known as the “Great Carrier Reef”.
But not all aircraft carriers ended up sunk or cut into pieces. Five decommissioned careers have
been turned into museums in the United States. USS Hornet, Intrepid, Lexington, Yorktown and
Midway. The first four are Essex-class carriers, while Midway was the lead ship of her class.
Yours truly visited Intrepid in October of 2021, and I highly recommend you check her
out if you’re ever in NYC. You can still ride the deck edge elevator, which is pretty cool.
But not all saved carriers are museums. USS Baylander, which is a US Navy Helicopter Landing
Trainer, is billed as the world's smallest aircraft carrier. Between 1986 and 2014,
she had more than 10,000 helicopter landings, so she is technically an aircraft carrier.
Baylander was originally a harbor utility craft that served during the Vietnam war.
After retirement, Baylander was involved in an art exhibition,
holding more than 2000 LED-equipped pigeons that flew at night. As one might expect,
arts didn’t quite pay the bills, so she is now in the hospitality industry. Baylander Steel
Beach is a floating restaurant located on the deck of the ex-USS Baylander.
Who wouldn’t wanna have fries and tacos on the smallest aircraft carrier in the world!