After decommissioning, carrier’s eventual fate unknown

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE — Nobody likes moving day — the packing, the lifting and, at day’s end, the echoing of an empty home.

Now, imagine emptying out an 80,000-ton ship with 2,550 compartments. It makes for an awful lot of refrigerators to unplug.

The crew aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk already is preparing for such a historic move, one that will end the ship’s 47-year career in the U.S. Navy.

As the carrier sails for Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, sailors will begin going through 19-point checklists to make sure the proper items get unplugged, collected and stored before the ship drops anchor in July at Bremerton, Wash. About 430 crewmembers will stay with the ship over the following few months, before the official decommissioning in January, the Navy said last week.

From there, the carrier’s eventual fate remains unknown.

A group in North Carolina wants it for a museum, homage to CV-63’s namesake location in the state. Congress this month talked about keeping the Kitty Hawk in ready-reserve status during the next few years.

After decommissioning, the carrier will be assigned to the Navy’s inactive ship inventory. The secretary of the Navy will make the "ultimate decision on disposition," Navy Lt. Clay Doss said in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes.

Moving-day preparations already are under way, even as sailors peel off to different assignments.

Chief Petty Officer Elison Talabong, an aviation ordnance specialist, said the carrier’s operational tempo, advancing age and shrinking crew means everyone does more with less.

"It’s challenging. We have the same mission — just with reduced personnel," Talabong said last week.

His department is currently down about 30 people. "So we all take jobs other than our primary duties," he said.

Once in Bremerton, the ship will get a full-scale shuttering that will take months.

Last year’s decommissioning of the USS John F. Kennedy called for the equivalent of 26,000 workdays, according to Doss. The work included emptying and cleaning all fuel oil tanks, deactivating and covering catapult troughs, deactivating and securing aircraft and weapons elevators, cleaning the ship’s piping system, and rigging for tow, Doss said.

Eventually, "Big John" was towed to a Navy facility in Philadelphia, where it’s held for safe stowage, Doss said.

The Kitty Hawk could end up in a similar mothball stage, at least for the near future. But earlier this month, the House Armed Services Committee approved paying for a study to determine the costs of reactivating the Kitty Hawk and the Kennedy, if needed.

A group in Wilmington, N.C., however, would like to claim the Kitty Hawk for public view.

Retired Navy Capt. Wilbur Jones is part of a statewide group, the Wilmington Kitty Hawk Concept Team, that plans to ask the Navy’s permission to turn the ship into a museum. Jones said the process could take five to seven years, and the team would have to hire a museum consultant and raise money for the project.

The group is in the process of filing for nonprofit tax status, is looking for a possible site, and hopes to hire a chairman soon, Jones said in an e-mail to Stripes.

"The most optimistic projection would have the ship arrive here in 2011-12," Jones said. "The Navy’s detailed bureaucratic application process is cumbersome but can be overcome."