Aircraft carrier traffic jam

Sometimes you just get lucky. As I was walking along the San Diego waterfront to get a better look at the USS Midway Museum, I was also taking pictures. One rarely sees an aircraft carrier in Massachusetts (although we do have a wonderful battleship, the USS Massachusetts).

As I got closer to the massive hulk of the museum’s main focus, I glanced left and was boggled by what I was seeing. CVB-41 (USS Midway) was almost blocking the sky, CVN-76 (USS Ronald Reagan) was moored across the channel and CVN-68 (USS Nimitz) was inbound, complete with tugs and with the crew lined up around the deck. It’s not likely that I’ll see that again. All right, if you live in San Diego it might not be that big a deal, but to me it sure was.

Since I had mentioned aircraft carriers in my earlier post, “Thinking about hardware”, I was absolutely going to figure out a way to include this photo in another post. Well, aircraft carriers have to be “manufactured” too, so that was a starting point. The Internet provided (links at the end) multiple archives of images including this one of the Midway being constructed in 1945.

Things were a little more sophisticated when the Reagan was being built.

The massive scale of the effort is just amazing. When I stumbled upon the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition (ACIBC), I knew I had found gold. Their mission statement says it all:

Go to this interactive map at their website and check out the lists of the coalition’s Industrial Base companies in each of 46 states. Bear in mind that this is just the coalition members, it doesn’t include the value provided by manufacturers of sub-components and raw materials.

In California alone, 130 companies have received “more than $212,165,827.88 in purchase order awards to produce components and provide services for the maintenance and construction of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.” Those dollars have provided for a lot of families and required just about every engineering, manufacturing and fabrication skill available.

So, consider the loop closed on aircraft carriers for now. That still leaves me trains and airplanes for future posts!

Excellent links:

Navy.mil - Official Website of the UNITED STATES NAVY

Haze Gray & Underway - World Aircraft Carrier Lists

NavSource - Naval History - Photographic History of the U.S. Navy