D wrote:
I just read in Defense News that the carrier USS America is going to
be sunk
in tests off the East Coast of the US.
snip

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

By John J. Lumpkin
ASSOCIATED PRESS

2:07 p.m. March 3, 2005

WASHINGTON - The Navy plans to send the retired carrier USS America
to the bottom of the Atlantic in explosive tests this spring, an end
that is difficult to swallow for some who served on board.

The Navy says the effort, which will cost $22 million, will provide
valuable data for the next generation of aircraft carriers, which are
now in development. No warship this size or larger has ever been sunk,
so there is a dearth of hard information on how well a supercarrier can
survive battle damage, said Pat Dolan, a spokeswoman for Naval Sea
Systems Command.

The Navy's plan raises mixed emotions in Ed Pelletier, who served on
the America as a helicopter crewman when the ship cruised the
Mediterranean shortly after its commissioning in 1965.

He said he was "unhappy that a ship with that name is going to meet
that fate, but happy she'll be going down still serving the country."
Pelletier, of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is a trustee of an association of
veterans who served on the America.

Issues surrounding a vessel bearing the name of its country are often
more sensitive than for other ships. In 1939, Adolf Hitler, fearful of
a loss of morale among his people should Germany's namesake ship be
sunk, ordered the pocket battleship Deutschland renamed for a long-dead
Prussian commander.

Since its decommissioning in 1996, the America has been moored with
dozens of other inactive warships at a Navy yard in Philadelphia. The
Navy's plan is to tow it to sea on April 11 - possibly stopping at
Norfolk, Va. - before heading to the deep ocean, 300 miles off the
Atlantic coast, for the tests, Dolan said.

There, in experiments that will last from four to six weeks, the Navy
will batter the America with explosives, both underwater and above the
surface, watching from afar and through monitoring devices placed on
the vessel.

These explosions would presumably simulate attacks by torpedoes, cruise
missiles and perhaps a small boat suicide attack like the one that
damaged the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

At the end, explosive scuttling charges placed to flood the ship will
be detonated, and the America will begin its descent to the sea floor,
more than 6,000 feet below.

The Navy has already removed some materials from the ship that could
cause environmental damage after it sinks, Dolan said.

Certain aspects of the tests are classified, and neither America's
former crew nor the news media will be allowed to view them in person,
Dolan said. The Navy does not want to give away too much information on
how a carrier could be sunk, she said.

Why the America? No other retired supercarriers were available on the
East Coast when the test was planned, Dolan said. The others - the
Forrestal and the Saratoga - were designated as potential museums,
she said.

In a letter to Pelletier's group, Adm. John Nathman, the Navy's
second-in-command, called America's destruction "one vital and final
contribution to our national defense."

"Ex-America's legacy will serve as a footprint in the design of future
aircraft carriers," he wrote.

Although no larger warship has ever been sunk, bigger civilian vessels
have gone down. The largest ship in the world, the supertanker Seawise
Giant, was sunk by Iraqi warplanes in the Strait of Hormuz during the
Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Fully loaded, it displaced more than half a
million tons. It was later refloated and renamed.

The America, which is more than 1,000 feet long and displaces about
80,000 tons, exceeds the size of the Japanese World War II battleships
Yamato and Musashi, and the carrier Shinano, which all displaced close
to 70,000 tons. The Yamato and Musashi fell to American warplanes, the
Shinano to a U.S. submarine.

The America was the third carrier of the non-nuclear Kitty Hawk class,
and the first to be retired, a victim of post-Cold War budget cuts
after 31 years at sea. It launched warplanes during the Vietnam War,
the 1986 conflict with Libya, the first Gulf War, and over
Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s.

Pelletier and other veterans who served on the America said their
farewells in a Feb. 25 ceremony at the ship in Philadelphia. Some
artifacts have been removed for museums and veterans' groups; in
addition, Pelletier's association will place a time capsule on board.

The Navy has several other carriers awaiting their fates. Environmental
regulations make breaking warships up for scrap metal largely
unprofitable, though some still are dismantled. The Oriskany, a smaller
carrier that was commissioned in 1950, is scheduled to be sunk as an
artificial reef off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., late this year.