An eagle-eyed reader named “Mike” wrote us over the weekend to make an interesting point about the Navy’s photo illustration released the day the Navy announced that the second Gerald R. Ford-class carrier will be named in honor of John F. Kennedy. His point? That ain’t no Ford.
“There’s plenty of renderings of the Ford Class available for use, and with the differences between classes you might as well be showing a picture of the Forrestal.”
Right you are. The carrier below JFK’s head is actually the Abraham Lincoln. The image was shot March 2 as the ship made its way across the Pacific near the end of its most-recent deployment. You can see the photo in its natural habitat here.
Ford and its follow-ons will look more like this.
4 Comments
The foolishness of this is mind boggling, if you don’t want to use an artist rendering of a Ford Class CVN, why not use a stock photo of the previous USS John F. Kennedy? Sure it’s not a nuke, but at least that would make some sense…
And as dissapointed as I am with the naming decision I at least remind myself that off all the names likely to come from the Obama Administration controlled Dept of the Navy (Soon to be Department of the Navy & Marine Corp) this is by far the most least offensive…
but in the wake of the USS Murtha and USNS Ceaser Chavez it still stings.
What happened to the naming the carrier Enterprise, since she is decommissioning or Lexington etc. What is CVN-80 going to be named, the Obama.
I had money on the USS Daniel Inouye, still think that’s CVN-80 if Obama is re-elected…