I was coming in to work today and saw a ship,
where my ship used to be...
It looked like an aircraft carrier, only
smaller...
The
USS MIDWAY (CV-41) arrived in town late last night - I thought she was going to
Broadway Pier, but instead she was at Pier 9, where my old boat used to moor
(back before they decommissioned the old girl
(snuffle).
MIDWAY has been
decommissioned for the better part of 10 years, and has recently been prepared
to be a museum piece for downtown San Diego. The thing that struck me was how
very small she was, compared to USS LAST SHIP, which in turn was small in
comparison to the NIMITZ class ships that make up the bulk of the carrier force
these days.
MIDWAY was a
forward-deployed carrier for many years, homeported in Yokusuka, Japan. I never
flew off of her (but did fly off one of her sister ships, CORAL SEA). She was
unique in a couple of different ways: for one thing she only had bow catapults,
with no cats on the waist. Strangely, she only had three arresting gear cables,
or wires. Turns out the deck was too short for another wire aft, and too short
forward to put an arresting gear that would stop a jet before it went over the
end without breaking something off.
This deck layout makes operating the
carrier in Cyclic Operations (the normal mode) rather difficult. With no waist
catapults (the ones in the landing area, angled outboard) the flight deck crew
had to do a full re-spot of all the aircraft from the preceding recovery prior
to the next launch. On a NIMITZ class (with a much bigger flight deck), this
could take 2 hours. MIDWAY's crew could somehow do it in less than 45 minutes.
This flexibility coined the expression "MIDWAY Magic," and it became a part of
her legend as a fighting ship.
For the
MIDWAY crew, the difficult was easy, and the impossible merely took a little
longer.
When I was stationed in Japan,
the MIDWAY had recently been relieved by the USS INDEPENDENCE, a FORRESTAL class
carrier. Her sisters (aside from FORRESTAL) were SARATOGA and RANGER. They were
awkward brutes, transitions between the World War II modified ships to the
NIMITZ class ships. INDY was not an easy ship to love, and she suffered in
comparison to the magical MIDWAY.
The
air wing would ask to do certain things that INDY couldn't do, and get turned
down by the ship. The pilots would start off saying, "well on MIDWAY, we used to
do thus and such." Which of course drove the INDY guys nuts. "You're not on
MIDWAY anymore."
By the time I joined
the ship, the MIDWAY had become "the M-word," and we weren't allowed to utter it
anymore.
Being a small carrier (45,000
tons, as opposed to 80k on my ship, and around 100k on the NIMITZ class), she
tended to bob around in heavy seas a bit more than was thought proper for a
lady. The shipwrights in Japan thought they could attach some stabilization
blisters to her hull, so that she would ride a bit better, in order to help the
pilots get aboard in poor weather. Someone didn't do all their fluid dynamics
homework very well, since in certain sea conditions, the blisters turned what
had been a mildly objectionable pitch, roll and heave into something that
belonged in a circus sideshow, or drunk tank.
-------------------------------------
One of the things I liked about the
older carriers were the names they carried - they evoked famous battles fought
and won, or were the names of brave ships from an earlier era recycled to the
new age. We had the ESSEX, YORKTOWN, INTREPID, HORNET, TICONDEROGA, LEXINGTON,
BUNKER HILL, WASP, BOXER, BON HOMME RICHARD, ANTIETAM, PRINCETON, KEARSARGE,
ORISKANY, SHANGRI-LA (?), TARAWA, VALLEY FORGE, and PHILLIPINE SEA. We had KITTY
HAWK, CONSTELLATION and AMERICA. We had an
ENTERPRISE.
Then we named a ship JOHN F
KENNEDY in memorial of Camelot lost, and the gates were opened to all manner of
political monikers. After NIMITZ, we had EISENHOWER, VINSON, ROOSEVELT, LINCOLN,
WASHINGTON, STENNIS, TRUMAN, REAGAN and finally BUSH (the elder).
Politicians.
I guess once the floodgates are open,
everyone wants a drink. And for $5billion or so, who are the uniform guys to
complain? Call it "FUSCHIA" or "PUMICE" so long as we get her on schedule and
she floats.
Please don't get me wrong,
I admire all (or most) of these men. Still, I sometimes envy the Royal Navy,
with their INVINCIBLEs and BROADSWORDs and DEVASTATIONs. Those are names to wear
on your sleeve or cap with pride.
Someday perhaps, we'll even have a
ship named the USS BILL CLINTON.
Won't
be a frigate though. A frigate only has one screw.
Posted @
08:35 PM
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"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
