There have been so many container ships off the coast of the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports for more than a year now that they could qualify as an armada.
But an aircraft carrier?
The unusual sight off the Long Beach coast on Monday, Jan. 24, was the USS Kitty Hawk, the U.S. Navy’s last conventionally powered aircraft carrier, which is on its way to the Gulf of Mexico off of Brownsville, Texas, where it will be scrapped.
The Long Beach stop allowed its accompanying tug boat to refuel. The ship was expected to head out again by Monday evening on its journey, which will take it farther down the Southern California coast and around South America, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.
The aircraft carrier will pass by San Diego.
The ship, commissioned in 1961, was one of three Kitty Hawk-class carriers to serve the Navy. It is one of the last U.S. carriers powered by fossil fuels.
It left Bremerton, Washington, on Jan. 16.
Because of its size — 280 feet wide and more than 1,000 feet long — the Kitty Hawk would be unable to travel through the Panama Canal and will instead go through the Strait of Magellan.
The ship saw heavy duty throughout the Vietnam War.
Its aircraft flew more than 5,000 missions that ranged the length of North Vietnam from December 1967 to February 1968, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command.
Major targets attacked included both Vinh and Kien An Airfields, along with the Long Vi thermal and Ban Thack hydro power plants, and the Hanoi port facility and communications center.
The vessel also saw conflict below deck in October 1972, when strife was reported between Black and White sailors, according to an article in Stars and Stripes. Records indicated that 47 were injured.
The carrier was later deployed off the coast of Somalia and was relocated to Yokosuka Naval Base, in Japan, in 1998. The Kitty Hawk participated in Operation Freedom, Southern Watch and Iraqi Freedom.
It was decommissioned 13 years ago.
Kitty Hawk was replaced by a nuclear-powered vessel, the Nimitz-class USS George Washington, in 2008 and the Kitty Hawk was decommissioned the next year.
Staff writer Erika Ritchie contributed to this report.