https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hi1VkNPJHA The aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman is cruising the Persian Gulf as we speak, launching strikes against ISIS in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, and a video posted to 360 Fly shows just what that looks like from the inside. The clip sent into the digital video gadget company shows an F/A-18F Super Hornet launch with one of the pilots from the Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia-based Strike Fighter Squadron 103 “Jolly Rogers.” VFA-103 is deployed on the Truman. The pilot recorded the take-off in 360 degrees, which means viewers can get a full view of what’s happening in the cockpit at…
Browsing: Carriers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EypzUduBqiQ It’s an event years in the making: No, not the new Star Wars movie. The aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower is out of the yards! The ship officially emerged in late August, and as it prepares for its first deployment next summer after two years in a Norfolk dry-dock, the public affairs department released an anticipation-building video parody entitled, “Sea Wars: The Ike Awakens.” The video mirrors the “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” trailer, with a very startled petty officer third class on the flight deck, a rolling mop bucket beeping like R2-D2 and an F/A-18 Hornet battling an…
Just over a year ago, retired Vice Adm. Mike Miller collected $100 each from the chief of naval operations and the Navy secretary as he handed over command of the Naval Academy. In his remarks, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told the crowd at Alumni Hall that he and Adm. Jon Greenert had made a bet four years earlier with Miller — a ’74 academy grad — that he wouldn’t last a second tour at the Naval Academy without getting in trouble. “… I think the main thing we share is the astonishment of his classmates and my shipmates from long ago…
Five-inch guns, crew-served weapons, Go-Pro small boat ops, MH-60 and fighter flybys: all set to dramatic music. The cruiser Normandy wants the folks back home to know they’ve got things covered in the Gulf. The video, posted on the command’s Facebook page, offers a glimpse into Navy life while deployed to the Middle East, minus the seemingly endless freshwater wash-downs. The ship is deployed with the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and is slated to return this fall. The Normandy will left Norfolk this Spring escorting the carrier Theodore Roosevelt to San Diego by way of the Middle East. Then the cruiser will continue on through…
Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford began testing the ship’s new electromagnetic aircraft launch system in Virginia’s James River on June 5, but before they can launch real aircraft, they have to practice. It’s not quite like a real, live flight deck, but it’s close. Gone are the cargo pants, brightly colored turtlenecks and helmets. Instead, a sailor in blueberries and a hard hat mimics the signals of a deck handler before the catapult launches a weight sled out over the river in a graceful swan dive. The slow motion impact with the water at the end is rather dramatic. EMALS testing began June 5, the latest step…
The Big Stick hit the shores of merry old England last week. The presence of the 100,000-ton carrier Theodore Roosevelt, on an eight-month deployment, created huge Buzz in Great Britain when it anchored off Portsmouth March 22 for a five-day port visit along with the destroyer Winston S. Churchill. The British papers went bananas, spectators lined the shores to catch a glimpse of the 1,100-foot-long warship and businesses hung American flags to welcome 5,000 sailors to the land of America’s one-time imperial overlords. Portsmouth’s local paper, The News, reported that the Roosevelt “stunned onlookers on Southsea seafront as she dwarfed…
[HTML1] The aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush is getting ready to wrap up its Persian Gulf deployment, but before they head home, they’re lending a hand to American operations against the Islamic State in Iraq. In this official Navy video, ordnancemen pack explosives to assemble bombs for the strikes. In the clip below, you’ll see what happens after they’re loaded onto F/A-18 Hornets and dropped onto targets. The video shows an airstrike in northern Iraq on Friday. [HTML2] The Bush carrier strike group and Carrier Air Wing 8 left Norfolk back in February and are scheduled to make their way…
A World-War II era Curtiss SB2C-5 Helldiver was unveiled at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. April 1. The Helldiver was the last purpose-built dive bomber to enter Naval service and was designed as a replacement for the smaller SBD Dauntless dive bomber. Poor lateral stability in the early Dash-1 versions led to its not-so-flattering fleet nicknames: Son-of-a-Bitch, Second-Class (for SB2C) or simply “The Beast.” By the end of WWII, guided bombs and rockets eliminated the need to point the entire airframe at the target in order to insure a successful bomb…
[HTML1] The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln entered a Virginia shipyard last March for a midlife overhaul that will last until October 2016. While the flattop is out of the fleet’s deployment plans for the foreseeable future, that doesn’t mean its sailors are getting a break. In the video above, from his ship’s barren bridge, Capt. Karl Thomas gives his crew an update on the carrier’s progress — which, to this point, has involved having a chunk of its island removed, its catapults taken apart and the bulk of its guts ripped out. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime procedure for a nuclear carrier,…
While the U.S. Navy awaits the delivery of the first-in-class aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford in 2016, the Chinese navy appears to have its own flattop-construction milestone on the horizon. According to media reports, China’s second carrier is under construction and slated for delivery in 2018. It’ll join the Liaoning, which debuted in 2012. It’s not exactly an armada, but every carrier fleet has to start somewhere. The Chinese carrier fleet, for example, started in the Ukraine. In 1998, a Hong Kong travel agency reportedly bought the unfinished, Cold War-era carrier Varyag from that former Soviet state, claiming it planned…
