USS Kitty Hawk On Its Final Cruise

In March of this year, the old warrior, the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk CV-63, left Naval Base Bremerton, WA, where she had been temporarily moored with the mothballed fleet. She left Bremerton shrouded under typical gray, fog-draped conditions, appearing like an eery ghost-like behemoth silently slipping out of the bay into the Salish Sea to begin its final voyage to the scrap yards at Brownsville, TX. She arrived in Brownsville on May 31, 2022.

Too big to go through the Panama Canal, her last voyage would be a 9,000 mile journey towed at a slow and stately pace by tugs. She was towed south along the length of South America, through tbe Straights of Magellan, up the east coast of South America into the Caribbean, and finally into the gulf and into the harbor at Brownsville, TX, where she will be broken down into scrap by the International Shipbreaking Co. Let.

Her departure from Bremerton was witnessed by many former sailors who had served on this noble old lady who had served the nation in combat in Vietnam and in Afghanistan and Iraq. She is the last of the oil-fired carriers. She was the first of her class to be commissioned and the last to be decommissioned. She was decommissioned in 2009 after serving for 10 years as the only permanently forward-deployed carrier in the Pacific fleet at Yosuke, Japan, from 1998 to 2008. Her decommissioning came one year later in 2009.

The USS Kitty Hawk was the second carrier to be so named, after Kitty Hawk, NC, where the Wright brothers successfully flew their invention of the airplane for the first time.

Watch this video and get a sense of the history of this last-of-its-kind carrier. You’ll hear personal comments by a couple of sailors who served on her, and you will feel the weight of history and nostalgia that goes with her on her last voyage.

So long, old warrior. The nation thanks you for your service.