While you ponder the whereabouts of CVW-17 whom I gladly flew with in the early 80's on the Forrestal - what is the going thinking on scrapping the CVA-67 JFK when it still offers so much.

(1) despite the hype that it is just a junk heap the worst retrofit costs reached some $600 million in figures
(2) thinking that the high retro cost (on a 1990 scale) would have killed it right off the Navy suddenly lost credibility in that when the new carrier CVN-21 started to grow from $3 billion to $5 billion to $7 billion and now ready to bust $10 billion; all of a sudden the JFK looks like a bargin
(3) of course once you retrofit the JFK you need to ask yourself what do I do with it when the nuclear CV navy is trying to go into a over-surge condition where two nuclear CV''s with added crew and equipment could pump sorties and operate as if it were three CV's, a sure upscale of ops-tempo and something that the JFK in any state of retrofit could not accomplish
(4) but - one could down scale the JFK and make it more Littoral, more Marine Assault, more Coast Guard, more NATO or UK'ish and hence potential new roles for both the JFK and the Kitty Hawk, the last conventional carriers but ships that could form their own new nitche.
(5) what say the experts



"DDAY" wrote in message k.net...
I stumbled across a website that mentioned the helicopter used in many of
the Apollo spacecraft recoveries which had the big "66" painted on its side.
The site said that this Sea King was lost in 1975 off the coast of San Diego
when it got pulled into the water while using its dipping sonar.

The site was unclear, but did the sonar actually catch on a submarine?

Also, the site said that although the US Navy incident report claims that
the helicopter is in very deep water, divers have actually located the wreck
in only about 230 feet of water and there is a group seeking to recover the
aircraft.

Anybody know any details?





D