USS Gerald Ford (CVN-78) Shaking Out in Newport News

During most of my three-year U.S. Army hitch in the early sixties I was stationed at Fort Story, which is sited on the Virginia coast at Cape Henry, and which marks the southern boundary of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay.  Fort Story was a small base that headquartered the Army’s amphibious operations on the east coast.  From our second-story office window at the base HQ I could look out the window, and occasionally I would grab the office binoculars when I spotted the nuclear powered aircraft carrier Enterprise (CVN-65) passing through the offshore channel.  Although officially classified, the scuttlebutt at the time was that the actual top speed of the Enterprise was about fifty miles per hour, and I remember idly wondering once how far the 95,000-ton carrier would penetrate the shoreline if her skipper were to run her onto the beach at full speed.

The Enterprise is now being decommissioned at the Huntington-Ingalls shipbuilding facility in Newport News, Virginia on the James River, along the northern circumference of the giant Hampton Roads anchorage.  This facility was once known as the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company, and was the shipyard for which my uncle was a welder in World War 2.  The Enterprise sits near it’s replacement, the nuclear powered carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78).

The Gerald Ford is the first of a new class of American carriers, designed to replace the Nimitz-class.  She is bigger than any previous American aircraft carrier, with a length of 1,106 feet and a displacement of 112,000 tons.  Among the many other improvements to her design, she will be the first U.S. carrier to use the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), which employs an electrically-powered sled to hurl planes into the air rather than a steam catapult.  The sailors assigned to the Enterprise used to say that her steam catapult could throw a Volkswagen Beatle a mile off her bow.  I don’t know how true that was, but the EMALS rig is supposed to be considerably more powerful than the steam catapults.

For much more information on the Ford, check out THIS article from Popular Mechanics magazine, and THIS entry on WikiPedia.