USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63)

First steel for the USS Kitty Hawk was laid down on December 27, 1956 at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation yard in Camden, New Jersey. She was launched by flooding the drydock she was constructed in on May 21, 1960 and commissioned on April 29,1961. If I’m counting them properly, it looks like she made 20 deployments up til the time she was forward deployed to Japan for the last 10 years of her service life. She was decommissioned on May 12, 2009 after more than 48 years of service. It does not appear the Kitty Hawk was ever made available for donation status as a museum. Not sure why, but my thought is maybe she was in pretty rough shape after such a long service life and the Navy knew it? Regardless, Kitty Hawk was towed from Puget Sound Naval Shipyard on January 15, 2022 and arrived in Brownsville, Texas on May 31, 2022 for scrapping.

Constructing the 3D digital model of the USS Kitty Hawk gives me an appreciation for how large the supercarriers are and how much steel they require to construct. It also puts into perspective how much shipbuilding capacity our nation has lost since the 1960’s. The United States was able to build and commission seven conventionally-powered supercarriers of the Forrestal and Kitty Hawk classes between 1955 and 1965 from three different shipyards. The US also commissioned its first nuclear powered carrier in 1961. For comparison, in the ten year period from 2017 to 2027 the US will struggle to commission and deploy two new carriers from just one shipyard, and less than three carriers in a twenty year span. Just one illustration of how much industrial capacity our nation has lost. Scary when you think about it.

The image of Kitty Hawk above is from Seaforces.org and the line drawing of the Kitty Hawk below is credited to Dr. Dan Saranga. Scroll through the images at the bottom of this page to see the progress of constructing the 3D digital model of the Kitty Hawk in Blender.