NAVY SINKS ‘AMERICA’

“No one has been able to land a [big] punch on an American [air­craft] car­rier for over half a cen­tury,” StrategyPage notes. “There is no prac­ti­cal knowl­edge about exactly how sturdy, or not, these big ships are.“
So the Navy is going to sink the USS America, decom­mis­sioned since 1996, to find out what hap­pens when the 1060-​​foot long car­rier gets hit, hard.
In $22 mil­lion worth of “exper­i­ments that will last from four to six weeks,” the AP reports, “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…
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, Pat Dolan, a spokes­woman for Naval Sea Systems Command, 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.

March 10th, 2005 | Ships and Subs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.