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Glad I'm not a passenger
- Thread starter cmartinez
- Start date
It looks like a parking lot, but this is actually the flight deck of USS Lexington, the legendary Essex-class aircraft carrier. Between training cycles, the carrier occasionally had a very different job: transporting sailors’ personal cars when the ship changed homeport or came out of an overhaul. Instead of shipping the cars commercially, they could simply load them onto the 4.5-acre flight deck. And USS Lexington wasn’t the only one. Kitty Hawk, Constellation and Ronald Reagan have all been used in a similar way.
I worked (setup and handled radio communications) with her many times in the 70's when I was at Key West and she was the training carrier from Pensacola.
I gotta ask the obvious question, how do they get them onto the ship?
ElectricSpidey
- Joined Dec 2, 2017
- 3,362
Think of all the other things of comparable size that have to be loaded and unloaded from the ship, such as tugs and fire fighting trucks.
Depends on the docking facilities available. If all else fails, they can lift them on with a crane. The car (probably a few at a time) are driven onto a palette and strapped down, then a crane lifts the palette onto the deck and the cars are unstrapped, moved to their shipping positions, and secured (I don't know what the strapdown points are like across the deck of a carrier, but probably pretty dense since they often need to strap aircraft down in a variety of positions). But if the docking facility can support it, they can be driven directly onto the ship, probably onto one of the elevators in a lowered position, and from there lifted to the flight deck.
ElectricSpidey
- Joined Dec 2, 2017
- 3,362
Here I've got one.
What kind of aircraft is that on the deck, visual search says it's a Tomcat...but I'm thinking, no.
Edit:
Second search says it's an A-5 Vigilante.
What kind of aircraft is that on the deck, visual search says it's a Tomcat...but I'm thinking, no.
Edit:
Second search says it's an A-5 Vigilante.
Yes, it's a A-5 Vigilante. We had the last of them at NAS key West in the 70's doing reconnaissance.
Sparky...
So the pic of the carrier with the cars ... it's about 50 years old?
Yes. Makes me feel old just thinking about it.
That would be about right looking at the cars on the deck, too.
I don't know if the Navy still moves POVs like this anymore or not. If the ops tempo didn't preclude it, I wouldn't be surprised if some law had been passed at some point prohibiting it because it was the government competing with private enterprise, probably enacted as the result of lobbyists for transport companies greasing hands in Congress.
It still happens when a carrier changes home ports.
https://www.theautopian.com/the-nav...t-what-sailors-like-to-drive/comment-page-1/#!
I'm glad to hear that -- an all too uncommon victory of common sense over bureaucracy.
They don't look like they are tied down in any way, but maybe they are still loading. I can't tell if those "puddles" are actually tiedown points. They seem to be periodically spaced, though.
