Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire USS Enterprise (CVN-65) decommissions 3 Feb

340boy,
It's correctly termed "the island"

Interesting side note. The scene in one of the Star Trek movies where they went to Enterprise to collect some nuclear fuel, wasn't filmed on Enterprise. It was filmed on USS Ranger in San Diego. I was mustering for the duty section on the hangar deck when they filmed the scene of Checkov? running across the hangar and taking the fall to the barge below.

I did a West Pac cruise on Enterprise as a member of VAQ-137 back in '74-'75. Hell of good ship. We had it better than the oil-burners because we always had water. Back in those days it was a bragging point to say you could shower every day.
George

No joke that. I recall being in a much smaller ship's CIC and watching the Big E's "blip" move across the screen. She was hauling ass at a speed I still have difficulty comprehending.

They have to build another.

There's just nothing like an object over 1000 feet long weighing close to 100,000 TONS moving at close to 50knots.

And with helpful winds you can add close to another 10 knots to that!

My uncle spent around 20 years on that thing.

The article stated that CV80 would inherit the moniker "Enterprise". Bravo Zulu, 65!!

A bunch of us old farts lobbied hard to name our last two Carriers Coral Sea and Midway after the two battles defining Naval Aviation, as you can see, we failed. I sure as hell hope they name a carrier Enterprise and not some Black Shoe cruiser!

How about a new ship, the SS Obama. It would have no guns, a crew of pussies and women who dress as pussies. On second thought, none of the crew would know how to work.

Barney Clark? The artificial heart dude??? So rude!

Poor Captain Kirk. Will Starfleet assign him to another star ship?

I served on CVA(N)65 on a WestPac cruise in '68 but not as ship's company. I was attached to RVAH-1 reconnaissance squadron flying the RA-5C Vigilante. 4 important things happened on that cruise, at least in my mind.

We went through a typhoon after we left Pearl and the seas tore off most of the flightdeck safety catwalks which were more than 100' above the water line. Talk about battening down the hatches! Instead of the weather getting warmer heading toward Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam, it got miserably cold as we steamed into the Sea of Japan after the Pueblo got snatched by the North Koreans.

We sailed in circles for almost a month only launching our 6 Viggies to keep track of the goings-on. Every tech in my ASB shop wrote down Long/Lat data after every launch; we would stick pins in a map to see where we'd been. Our AN/ASB12 inertial navigation system used the same digital VERDAN computer as the Enterprise. There's crapped the bed once and we loaned them one of our spares until IAMD could fix their original.

At that time, Enterprise was still considered a SHOWBOAT, being the only nuke carrier and still fairly new. We made a stop at Sasebo, Japan Navy base for R&R. And promptly got inundated with protesters. It seems Enterprise was the first nuke there since we bombed them in WWII. They took offense and all our leaves were cut short because the top brass feared major retaliation.

Today happens to be the 49th anniversary of the TET offensive. We got there just in time to spend the next 62 days online without a break. FYI, all carriers must sail into the wind to launch and recover aircraft. At that time of year the wind came from onshore so we were always sailing toward the beach. Viet Cong artillery reached to 24 miles. Oft times we sailed closer than that to launch/recover the last few aircraft. VC gunners threw everything they had at Enterprise as it would have been the prize of all prizes if hit--another feather in their cap, propaganda-wise. But they never did. A couple of our plane guards got smacked and we took in their wounded to our hospital. Enterprise earned the battle efficiency E for that cruise. You can see it painted on the island from pictures of that era.

Finally after ~6 months, we got relieved by another carrier. The captain came on the horn and asked everyone their opinion: should we poke along with the rest of our flotilla back to the west coast or should we beat feet as fast as our 8 nuke reactors could take us? A definite rhetorical question as I couldn't hear anyone scream in favor of the slow boat cruise home. It took less than 4 hours for all other ships in our carrier group to disappear from sight.

Once again the Viggi's inertial navigation system proved useful to tell us how fast Enterprise was putting WestPac behind us.
46 kkknnnnoooottttssss. I'm sure it would have been faster but one of the 4 prop shafts was bent causing everything inside and outside to shudder unmercifully. But we didn't care. And no stack gas to inhale ever.

RIP Enterprise

Tied with the F-11 Tiger for the best looking jet the Navy has ever flown. I'm glad I wasn't an NFO in one though.

correct!

I'm glad we didn't have to deal with the R-5 or the A-3. Too darn big, and took up too much room on the deck. F-14s were bad enough. Same for E-2s now that I think about it.

You don't hear much about that one. What a beautiful aircraft. I remember building a model of it that had the 'nuke' that came out the back. I bombed lots of anthills with that sucker. Booom!

Snake,
Thanks for the correction!