[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,…
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Sailors on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln opened a time capsule of sorts last month and didn’t know it. While performing work connected to the refueling and complex overhaul Lincoln is undergoing at Virginia’s Newport News Shipbuilding, sailors assigned to the ship’s combat systems department found the signatures of two sailors on the carrier’s original deck plates while they were removing tiles. The plankowners made their marks less than a year after the ship’s 1989 commissioning. A picture of the signatures went up on the ship’s official Facebook page shortly after the Oct. 23 find. In a social media success…
It can hold 14 helicopters. It’s more than 800 feet long. It has a very flat top: It’s Japan’s largest warship since World War II — unveiled on the 68th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. But it’s not a carrier. The destroyer Izumo cost $1.2 billion and goes public amid territorial clashes between China and Japan (China, for its part, appears to be always ready). Japanese officials insist the Aug. 6 unveiling was coincidental and had more to do with favorable ocean tides than World War II history, according to this AFP report. They also insist the ship…