The reason for the trip as per the front cover was the annual conference I've been attanding for nearly twenty years now - generally make about two years out of three. The incentive this year was the USS Midway. When I heard the conference was to be held in San Diego the pull of an aircraft carrier was felt right across the Pacific. The Hotel was chosen for its proximity to the ship as opposed to the conference centre.
So wag the cerebral pursuit last Monday afternoon to stroll along to the Midway.
As we walked towards it I was initially a bit disappointed - it didn't look big enough. Wrong. As you get closer the awful truth dawns upon you - it is absolutely massive, huge, humungous. An afternoon strolling all over this peak of man's engineering expertise sets you back $17 and is the best value tourist dollar I've ever spent. This behemoth is extreme in every way. All the numbers are off the dial. 296m long, a beam of 34m rising to 72m in the middle of the flight deck. Displacement 74,000 tons, crew of 4,100 and so it goes on. 200,000 shaft horse power delivered through four shafts. And all this was built in eighteen months - astonishing. Maximum shaft rpm was 205 which propelled the 74,000 tons at thirty three knots. How do you do that? Having prop blades the size of a tennis courts is probably up there somewhere. At decommissioning the flight deck had an area of 4.2 acres - which means I couldn't fit three on my property. I could have two though.
This shot is taken up by the catapults - just look how far away the island is. The planes on the ship now are a selection of what has been on the carrier over the years and are not representative of any moment in time. Fancy seeing this coming straight at you - a F14 Tomcat
All the grunt is below decks, engine rooms, engineering departments, armaments etc. All the missiles and bombs were actually assembled on board and this happened on the mess deck. SO you could be tucking into your brekker with a bloke next to you fitting the fins on a missile - bizarre. But the thinking goes on in the island.
The flight control is aft (the windows that look like, well a flight control centre) and the bridge is out of sight in this shot.
Helming from the flybridge of a Carolina Classic 28 is going to seem a bit wimpy after I've had this helm view. Just check out how small the people on the flight deck look and how far away the bow is - and we are only half way down the ship here. The Midway was decommissioned in the late nineties and the US Navy has since got rid of paper charts but this ship is exhibited as it was used operationally. The navigation seems positively primitive. A chart with a course plotted into Yokosuka (the ship's home base for the latter part of its life) was laid out on one of the chart tables. It had cocked hats on it that were about a half mile across and this about four miles off shore. I'm not sure I'd like to drive something this big with that degree of inaccuracy
I had long thought that man was put on this planet to build aircraft carriers as evidence that he had reached the absolute pinnacle of his technological mastery of his world. I now know this to be true. They have everything. Self contained (the last piece of this particular puzzle is, of course, nuclear power), big, aggressive and carrying enough firepower to take your head off in all sorts of inventive ways at any point on the planet.
I love them and I want one.
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