http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/11145412/detail.html#
check it out it is here in boston this weekend for it’s final visit b4 being decom in a couple weeks clck on the ship for a video
Its decommisioning is way over due. The engineering plant is worn out and rotten. It was the reason the Teddy Roosevelt was online for 155 days straight without a portcall. There are a lot of sailors who will be glad to see her go.
what do you mean when you say worn out and rotten
Worn out and rotten as in they darn near had to tow that overaged barge back into port the last time.
mfsob
maybe i am a bit thick skulled but could you elaborate
i mean we have other ships built during the same time or earlier still being used
Just like two cars coming off the assembly line, one is kept up well, driven only on Sundays (like a ship stationed in the Pacific, where the ocean is well named), and gets upkeep from Japanese and Navy owned shipyards. Kitty Hawk is an example of this type. And the other is a daily driver, travels rough terrain (like the Atlantic Ocean) and gets crappy maintenance from non-Navy owned shipyards. The Kennedy is an example of this type. She was ridden hard and put up wet as the saying goes. Its a shame but a fact of a ship’s life.
As anyone who has spent any time at sea knows, maintenance is a constant challenge. Get some sloppy work during the yard periods and you can never really catch up. I don’t like to perpetuate stereotypes, but subfixers comment about (lowest-bid) outside contractors seems to ring true all too often.
It brings to mind all the discussions over on the Aircraft board about the weathering of modern carrier aircraft. Same thing applies to the ship they’re flying from.
JFK was never exactly state-of-the-art anyway. She and America were pretty much stop-gap efforts while they tried to figure out the Enterprise’s first-generation nuke power plants.
You know what’s sad? I didn’t even know there was a USS JFK…
It just proves that just when you think you know a lot, something else pops up. [:I]
subfixer compares JFK and Kitty Hawk to a couple of vehicles that were new at the same time.
Let’s extend that analogy just a bit. And let’s call them pickups, because people seem to take care of a good pickup a lot longer than they do a sedan or a minvan.
One of those pickups was given an oil change every 5,000 miles and the other got it changed every 7-8,000 miles (still not too bad, right?) One of them got its major maintenance jobs done almost on the dot of 50,000 miles and 75,000 miles, just like the manufacturer wrote in the warranty book, well, give or take 5,000 miles. Still pretty close. And the other might have missed those goals by 10 or 12, or maybe 19,000 miles. Stll made most of the major checks in good faith, but sometimes the old pickup was out on a cross-country trip when the maintenance came due, or sometimes the family budget just couldn’t handle that $800 expense for changing a serpentine belt that we couldn’t even see. You know the feeling? Let’s put that maintenance off for the next check and hope it doesn’t break until the next 50K check, OK? (That is called “deferred maintenance”, whether it is on a ship, your car or failing to clean your gutters - pay me now or pay me later)
And the capper is that those two pickups are now at the 800,000 mile point of their lives now. They are OLD. They have both had a lot of oil changes, a lot of ring jobs, and the transmission has been rebuilt from the ground up three times. About the only original equipment left is the VIN label. The pickups still haul a load pretty good, but one is still reliable, and the other is needing to visit the garage a lot more because of that deferred maintenance.
There’s a whole 'nother discussion about maintaining the ship with a short-handed staff, as JFK was for the several year period when she was supposed to be a USNR asset and not manned to the full standard, but I can’t use this analogy for that.
Let’s just say these ships are OLD.
Rick
| all i hope is that the USS BUSH is not replasing it. I have orders there already [8D] |
|---|
Yeah, attempting to keep up something as massive and complex as an aircraft carrier with a bunch of part time reservists - dedicated though they may be - and then expressing shock and amazement when that doesn’t work … sometimes, I really do wonder what the Navy is thinking.
It’s too bad the JFK has been so poorly maintained. In fact Big John was going to be a nuke but congress decided that it would be oil fired after the keel had been laid. Her flight deck arrangement is virtually the same as the follow on Nimitz class. Indeed, she has more in common with the Nimitz class than she does with the earlier Kitty Hawk class. I’ve heard that when word went out that the Navy was going to close the Philly Shipyard many experienced workers left to find work elsewhere. This all happened while JFK was midway undergoing her SLEP mods. Once she returned to Mayport afterwards there were several accidents while in port, the Captain was very publicly relieved of his command due to the material deterioration of the ship. I believe he was a bit of a scapegoat for the Navy though. They never funded the ship properly to get things up to snuff. There were many problems with her after the SLEP job. Thanks to privatization and substandard workers for contributing so much to preserve our national defense.
ok now if one wanted to model the jfk which models on the market today would be the best starting point
I would say a Nimitz. In 1/720 there’s the Italieri Nimitz. Does Trumpeter do one in 1/700? There would be a few mods to the flight deck as well as the sponsons as well as a totally new island. I would have to check my references, possibly the front of the Nimitz island could be used adding to the rear. Most definitely you could not use anything like the America or earlier, totally different flight deck.
I wanted to see her, I didn’t want to wait in line. I’m from Boston. They turned away 3500 people yesterday at around 3, so I’ve read.
cool are you still here?
are you from boston or a suburb
i was born there in the n-end but raised in somerville and arlington
moved to malden after i got married now i lice here in lowell this is my last move i will die here
Just about any destroyerman knows the USS John F. Kennedy…she’s a “can opener”. USS Belknap sailors know her all too well, that encounter added “Class D” to the list of types of fires.