Kitty Hawk became world-famous after the Wright brothers made the first controlled powered airplane flights at Kill Devil Hills, four miles (6 km) south of the town, on December 17, 1903. ![]() ![]() The name Kitty Hawk is derived from the native Algonquin Amerindian language word Chickahawk, meaning "a place to hunt geese". It was established in the early 18th century as Chickahawk. The population was 3,708 at the 2020 United States Census. Josh Farley is a reporter covering the military and Bremerton for the Kitsap Sun.Kitty Hawk is a town in Dare County, North Carolina, on Bodie Island, part of what is known as the state's Outer Banks. The San Diego-ported USS Midway, a flattop that served from 1945 to 1992, was the last the Navy turned into a museum.ġ956: The keel is laid by New York Shipbuilding Corporation for the second ship named after Kitty Hawk, N.C., site of the Wright brothers' first flight.ġ961: The USS Kitty Hawk is commissioned in 1961 at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.ġ963: The "Battle Cat" conducts "experiments" to find out if the U2 high-altitude reconnaissance planes could land on a carrier.ġ969: The flattop is awarded a presidential unit citation for its participation off Vietnam during the Tet Offensive.ġ972: A race riot aboard the ship ended with almost 60 injured men and "initiated reforms in the Navy culture."ġ984: The carrier collides with a surfacing Russian submarine in the Tsushima Strait, leaving the sub's propeller embedded in the carrier's hull.ġ992: Kitty Hawk supports Operation Restore Hope off Somalia.ġ998: The warship pulls into Yokosuka, Japan, to serve as the forward-deployed carrier in the 7th Fleet.Ģ003: The carrier and its crew are a part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.Ģ009: The Kitty Hawk is decommissioned and brought to its new home at the Navy's mothball fleet in Bremerton.Ģ017: The Navy announces the Kitty Hawk will be dismantled, disappointing sailors and others who called for the ship's preservation as a museum.Ģ021: The Kitty Hawk's hull is scraped in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard to remove marine growth and prepare it for the journey to Texas. Advocates worried that there will never be another carrier preserved for posterity, as those of the nuclear-powered era must be mangled to remove all radioactive remnants. Though many sailors and others advocated for its preservation, the Navy declined to pursue that course. It was decommissioned a year later and has been in mothballs in Bremerton until this year.įive former aircraft carriers have been turned into museums, but the Kitty Hawk will not be one of them. The Kitty Hawk was also the fleet's only permanently forward-deployed carrier in Yokosuka, Japan, from 1998 to 2008. The Kitty Hawk participated in combat operations during the nation's wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. More: Former Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier leaves dry dock in Bremerton Under an agreement with the state, Suquamish Tribe and other groups, the ship's hull could not be cleaned in Sinclair Inlet after a previous carrier's scrubbing sparked environmental concerns. The Kitty Hawk got a rare visit to one of the Navy's only two carrier dry docks in 2021 so that its marine growth could be scraped off. More: USS Kitty Hawk veterans devastated the aircraft carrier is headed for the scrapyard “While most people were graduating from high school and college, I was 30 feet below the waterline, halfway around the world from home.”Ī Foss tugboat pulls the USS Kitty Hawk away fromt he pier at Naval Base Kitsap-Bremerton on Saturday, Jan. “As hard as life was on this ship, it’s part of my history,” said Urband, who served from 1992 to 1996 as a machinist’s mate. Many swapped stories of being thrust onto a Navy ship, put in charge of millions in equipment and the care of thousands of lives. At more than 1,000 feet long, the Kitty Hawk won't fit in the Panama Canal, so the warship will be tugged through the Strait of Magellan en route to Brownsville, Texas.Ĭorey Urband, a Navy veteran who became a machinist at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, was among those old sailors gathered to see it go. Onlookers, many of them former sailors aboard the "Battle Cat," watched as tugs pulled the rugged warship into Sinclair Inlet on a foggy Saturday morning. ![]() BREMERTON - The USS Kitty Hawk, the nation's last oil-fired aircraft carrier, departed Bremerton on Saturday for a 16,000-mile journey around South America for its ultimate fate: scrapping at a Texas shipyard.
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