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US Navy Sells 'Top Gun' Aircraft Carrier For One Penny
HughPickens.com writes Kitsap Sun reports at Military.com that the USS Ranger, a 1,050-foot-long, 56,000-ton Forrestal-class aircraft carrier, is being towed from the inactive ship maintenance facility at Puget Sound for a 3,400-mile, around-Cape Horn voyage to a Texas dismantler who acquired the Vietnam-era warship for a penny for scrap metal. "Under the contract, the company will be paid $0.01. The price reflects the net price proposed by International Shipbreaking, which considered the estimated proceeds from the sale of the scrap metal to be generated from dismantling," said officials for NAVSEA. "[One cent] is the lowest price the Navy could possibly have paid the contractor for towing and dismantling the ship."
The Ranger was commissioned Aug. 10, 1957, at Norfolk Naval Shipyard and decommissioned July 10, 1993, after more than 35 years of service. It was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on March 8, 2004, and redesignated for donation. After eight years on donation hold, the USS Ranger Foundation was unable to raise the funds to convert the ship into a museum or to overcome the physical obstacles of transporting the ship up the Columbia River to Fairview, Oregon. As a result, the Ranger was removed from the list of ships available for donation and designated for dismantling. The Navy, which can't retain inactive ships indefinitely, can't donate a vessel unless the application fully meets the Navy's minimum requirements. The Ranger had been in pristine condition, but for a week in August volunteers from other naval museums were allowed to remove items to improve their ships. The Ranger was in a slew of movies and television shows, including "The Six Million Dollar Man," "Flight of the Intruder" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" where it stood in for the USS Enterprise carrier. But the Ranger's most famous role was in the 1980's Tom Cruise hit, "Top Gun." "We would have liked to have seen it become a museum, but it just wasn't in the cards," Navy spokesman Chris Johnson told Fox. "But unfortunately, it is a difficult proposition to raise funds. The group that was going to collect donations had a $35 million budget plan but was only able to raise $100,000."
The Ranger was commissioned Aug. 10, 1957, at Norfolk Naval Shipyard and decommissioned July 10, 1993, after more than 35 years of service. It was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on March 8, 2004, and redesignated for donation. After eight years on donation hold, the USS Ranger Foundation was unable to raise the funds to convert the ship into a museum or to overcome the physical obstacles of transporting the ship up the Columbia River to Fairview, Oregon. As a result, the Ranger was removed from the list of ships available for donation and designated for dismantling. The Navy, which can't retain inactive ships indefinitely, can't donate a vessel unless the application fully meets the Navy's minimum requirements. The Ranger had been in pristine condition, but for a week in August volunteers from other naval museums were allowed to remove items to improve their ships. The Ranger was in a slew of movies and television shows, including "The Six Million Dollar Man," "Flight of the Intruder" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" where it stood in for the USS Enterprise carrier. But the Ranger's most famous role was in the 1980's Tom Cruise hit, "Top Gun." "We would have liked to have seen it become a museum, but it just wasn't in the cards," Navy spokesman Chris Johnson told Fox. "But unfortunately, it is a difficult proposition to raise funds. The group that was going to collect donations had a $35 million budget plan but was only able to raise $100,000."
Correction: Navy *pays* a company $0.01 to a company for the service of removing it and dismantling it.
It didn't sell anything.
Kid-proof tablet..
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
I got the "in pristine condition" from http://www.military.com/daily-..., which is one of the links in the summary. I would think that they should know.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Hah! The Navy has no manpower any more; certainly not for construction and demolition. The Navy doesn't build aircraft carriers; why should they dismantle them? Everything that is done except direct warfighting and readiness for warfighting is farmed out.
On August 14 1945, the Navy had in active service 23 battleships, 28 fleet carriers, 71 escort carriers, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, 361 frigates, and 232 subs: a total of 6786 ships, including auxiliaries. The total personnel strength was 3.4 million. Uniformed personnel cooked the meals, drove the trucks, loaded ammunition and fueled the ships, etc.
On September 30 2006, the Navy had 0 battleships, 12 carriers, 27 cruisers, 54 destroyers, 35 frigates, and 74 subs: a total of 318 ships including auxiliaries. The total personnel strength was 0.35 million. Meals, truck driving, loading and fueling, etc, are all performed by hired service companies - just like for the Army and doubtless the Air Force (not entirely sure about the Marines, but probably them too).
The size has shrunk considerably since 2006. This despite having twice the national population to draw upon. The Navy can barely man its ships, let alone sparing "manpower" for non-essential tasks. And just like the merchant marine, knowledge, specialties, and capabilities have been cut way back. There are no more hundreds of sailors manning the engine rooms in large ships. The engines are automated.
Now the highly shrunken US Navy dwarfs all other navies of all other countries by an order of magnitude, I am sure tonnage of the next five navies would not match US Navy's today.
Off by one. It's not five, but six by this list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_warships
And raw tonnage is a terrible metric, as bad as raw numbers of ships.
Mitt Romney could have tried to make a legitimate remark about the operational capacity of the US Navy. Instead, he chose to make a blithe analogy that discredited himself.
These ships are not cheap to maintain, even in museum status. The battleship U.S.S. Massachusetts, berthed at Battleship Cove, costs over $1M per year to keep in presentable and safe condition for tourists, keep the lights and ventilation on, etc.., and that doesn't count the significant volunteer work that is done for free.The pier built for it was something over $10M IIRC. That's all for a ship that doesn't go anywhere anymore. It just sits and floats. I believe Battleship Cove was offered the U.S.S. JFK (Enterprise(?) class nuclear carrier), but they simply could not afford to build the proper pier structure for a ship of that size, never mind the annual upkeep.
Just sitting in the water takes a big toll on these vessels. They need hull maintenance and paint regularly. Their hulls wear thin over the years due to corrosion, and periodic corrosion removal and repainting. If you just left them to the weather and never maintained the hulls they'd probably rot through and sink in a few decades.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!