From the bridge, visitors can observe the active fleet carriers across the harbor. Nimitz is behind the security fence, with space prepared for Reagan, which will arrive a few days after this picture was taken on 3 July 2006.
The bridge is a great place for the younger set to play at captain. One of the guides noticed my Lake Geneva Yacht Club shirt and teased me about "anything this big on Lake Geneva." (No, but visit Lake Michigan. Iron ore, as we will discover, is not as challenging a cargo as an air wing.)
The flight deck is home to a number of preserved carrier aircraft, including this F9F in what became the early Blue Angels paint scheme.
But before Midway was an exhibit on the San Diego waterfront, she was one of the final carriers laid down during World War II, using a battleship hull, and after a rebuild to the British angled flight deck configuration, she remained in commission until after Desert Storm. The museum association has commissioned two histories of Midway, and Midway Magic becomes the promised Book Review No. 27.
An aircraft carrier requires men to live in close proximity at sea for long periods of time. These bunks make the Amtrak Superliner roomettes look spacious.
Government issued storage: some compartments under one's bunk, and a locker nearby. (Under really crowded circumstances, some of these bunks are occupied under the hot bunk system, with multiple occupants.)
A naval ship is home to large numbers of rough men who are often at sea for a long time. The book does not pull any punches about some of the more serious breaches of discipline that occurred at sea, nor does it sugar-coat the primary task of sick bay after a spell of shore-leave.
The purpose of an aircraft carrier is to accomplish two dangerous tasks. The first is to launch aircraft. It's rather noisy with planes on the catapults running at full power (the only hope a pilot has of surviving in case of a premature launch) and the Navy, like the railroads, describes carrier doctrine as "rules written in blood." Midway Magic lists all the flyers who died launching or landing, with additional details of some of the lessons learned. As if launching planes isn't enough, Midway made a winter cruise to the North Atlantic to demonstrate the capability to launch in arctic conditions; she was also the platform for the test of a ship-launched ballistic missile (using a German V-2) and for the anticipated use of jet-assisted Neptune land planes in a nuclear reprise of the Doolittle raid. That, in addition to the normal operations off Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait, and a patrol to the Taiwan Strait for which not all the details are yet known.
Once the planes are up, if they're not on a Doolittle raid or staging to land, they have to return to the carrier. There's a landing signal officer who is supposed to signal arriving planes to continue their landing or go around, and to grade the pilots on the quality of their landing He is in this exposed position between a controlled crash and the deep blue sea.
The pilots also have this focused Fresnel lens display that beams different color lights at the plane depending on whether it's on the right angle of approach or too high or too low. That sounds straightforward enough on a calm day in a harbor, but imagine the tossing North Atlantic in a snowstorm.
Belowdecks, the control panel for the power plants. I remarked to the retired engineering officer here that I'd have to rethink my characterization of the steam locomotive as the most complicated piece of transportation equipment to operate, and he was gracious enought to note that with a turbine engine, more speed is simply a matter of more steam pressure. None of this limited-cutoff-exploit-expansion-reduce-back-pressure.
The engineering and maintenance staffs have their customs and their rivalries, but a member of the flight deck crew or a pilot had best disrespect any one of the crafts.
At sea, you don't just call up the NAPA dealer or find the next roundhouse to effect repairs, and Midway is a bit large to trailer to Fiberglass Specialists. Much of the repair work, including damage control, and Midway did have a few close encounters of the collision kind, is done in-house. Lathes, drill presses, milling machines, tracks for overhead hoists.
What was I saying about Milwaukee making the tools that made Fordism possible?
A carrier is also preparing food for crew members, in some situations around the clock. Midway also distinguished herself on more than one occasion evacuating children from natural or man-made disasters.
Responsibility for keeping a carrier in proper form rests with the senior officers. The executive officer has an office with the utilities concealed behind a drop ceiling.
I wonder if the Navy and Amtrak have the same source of blue blankets. The executive officer, as below, and the captain get private quarters, as well as the responsibilities that go with those quarters.
Midway had captains with different command styles and different reputations. They generally acquitted themselves well. (At least one carried off a for-real Tom Clancyesque "if we were serious you'd be dead" supersonic pass over a shadowing warship not flying an allied flag. You'll have to read the book. This is a review, not a highlight reel.)
Midway holds the endurance record for a carrier patrol. The now-notorious "Mission Accomplished" banner on Abraham Lincoln recognized a protracted patrol of 282 days required by Operation Iraqi Freedom. Midway was at sea for 327 days ending in 1973, and she homeported in Japan. Despite the carrier's name, the book reports the Navy and the crew established a good working relationship with Japanese technicians, who reciprocated by taking good care of the ship.
No comments:
Post a Comment