The U.S.S Hornet (CV-12) [Joshua Burke]

The U.S.S Hornet (CV-12)

Sea Glass rolled into the San Francisco Harbor after an… eventful journey from Eureka. The voyage was absolutely fantastic until our main engine just decided to take a siesta. Good for the engine, bad for us. The super frustrating part was that our engine quit when we were 70 nautical miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. Seeing that the problem couldn't be fixed with parts that we currently had aboard (a broken fuel injector pump), we sailed in great winds. Nothing could get worse, right? Wrong. Our wind petered out when we were only a few miles from the Golden Gate Bridge! So then we sailed what felt like a snail’s pace, we did an average of 1.5-2 knots under sail. What would usually take us a couple of hours took us almost half a day! After we passed under the Golden Gate Bridge we had Vessel Assist tow us to the San Francisco Marina and that concluded our Eureka – San Francisco passage. 

We stayed in San Francisco for about a month and it being an extraordinary city, we did a lot of adventuring. I will talk about the other neat things (one of them going to Industrial Light and Magic on a private tour) in another post. When we were anchored in Alameda, we were close enough to go see a ship that is in all of the history books: The United States Ship Hornet (CV-12). Now this ship isn’t some any old ship (she is 72 years old however), she is a mighty Essex Class aircraft carrier that played a huge part in the victory over the Empire of Japan in World War 2, and also helped in Korea and Vietnam. She also recovered Apollo 11's and 12's space capsules with the astronauts aboard them after they fell from space. The Hornet is best known for her role in WW2. During that conflict she shot down 668 aircraft and destroyed 772 aircraft on the ground, sunk 1 aircraft carrier, sunk 1 cruiser and 10 destroyers,  sunk 42 cargo and transport ships, and had a major assist in the sinking one of the biggest battle ships ever built in the world: the Yamato.

The U.S.S Hornet

Each one of those Japanese flags stands for one Japanese plane shot down.

Now as I was walking toward her she seemed like a pretty small aircraft carrier. But she just kept getting bigger and bigger until I fully took in the 894 foot boat.  She is HUGE and what is amazing is that they built her in under a year. The only reason we are able to come aboard her is because the US Navy donated her to the USS Hornet Foundation and they then turned her into a floating museum. She is kept up and maintained by volunteers, many of them ex-Navy men who served aboard her in the many conflicts she faced, and is only funded by donations and the museum fee. I have to say they have done a marvelous job at keeping her fixed and floating. 

Me in the bomb bay (where they kept all of the bombs for the aircraft).

For the picture above: This is actually the TBM Avenger that George H. W. Bush got shot down in during WW2. It was found and as you can see, been restored to its formal glory. Also, Bush was not ever assigned to the Hornet and the plane was moved to the Hornet after its restoration. 

The Hornet CV-12 is the 8th ship to be named “U.S.S Hornet”; the first ship to be named the Hornet was built in 1775 in the Revolutionary War. Since then United States Ships named Hornet have served in the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, World War 2, and the Civil War. The first Aircraft Carrier named Hornet was CV-8 built in 1941. She fought the early battles of WW2 until she was sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. CV-8 was the last aircraft carrier to be sunk by enemy fire. In retaliation the United States started to immediately build another aircraft carrier named the Hornet. This is CV-12 and she was known as the grey ghost because she was built right after the destruction of the last Hornet. CV-12 was actually three aircraft carriers. Sounds crazy, right? Well she was CV-12 from 1943-47, CVA-12 from 1953-58 and CVS-12 from 1958-70. CV-12, CVA-12, and CVS-12 were actually all the same aircraft carrier CV-12. The only difference between them was heavy modifications and different roles. 

This famous photo is in a lot of the history books I have. (Read the top of the photo)

CV-12 sometime after WW2.

We arrived just in time to do the engine room tour and to see some other parts of the carrier that are usually kept closed to the visitors.  The tour guide lead us down one flight of stairs to another, and I started to realize that if this ship looked big on the outside, it is a whole lot bigger on the inside. The engine room was actually pretty neat. The aircraft carrier has eight huge oil-fired boilers that provide steam to the four engines. These engines turned four propellers (each of them weigh 27,190 pounds each!) that could propel the Hornet at a maximum speed of 33 knots. However, she usually just sped at 15-20 knots. Also, she could travel 20,000 nautical miles at 15 knots. On Sea Glass we do an average of about 6 knots and have an engine range of 700 nautical miles. Besides from the engines and boilers, she also had four electric generators and two emergency electric generators. She needs a lot of mechanics that's for sure. 

About half of the various dials and controls for the boilers.

One of the eight boilers.

The aircraft carrier’s main job is to project power using air power, and the Hornet had a lot of air power. Her air group (the men and woman who fly the airplanes and provide maintenance for the airplanes) consisted of 500 personal of the 4,000 personal usually aboard her. She housed about 90 airplanes that consisted of fighters, cargo planes, bombers, electronic warfare, etc. To launch these mighty planes she had two catapults which took the plane from 0 mph to 110 mph in a few seconds. In order for the plane to land, she had four arresting wires in which the plane hooked onto when landing to stop the plane from rolling off the end of the deck. 

What Sea Glass looks like from the Hornet.

One of the two elevators that took aircraft from the flight deck to the hanger deck and vice-versa. 

A F-4 Phantom. This aircraft served mainly in Vietnam.

In the foreground is a F-14 tomcat and a S-3 Viking in the background. 

 After the engine tour we immediately went to a tour of “the island” or the super structure that is the communication hub of the entire ship. Inside there was the navigation bridge, the flag bridge, and the bridge. What I thought was really interesting was that the bridges were actually uncovered; they had no roof, during WW2. That meant if you were the helmsman and if it was raining you got wet, if it was cold you got cold, and if a bomb from a Japanese plane happened to fall on your position, most likely you would die. However, with the introduction of the jet plane, the jet exhaust and noise that came with the jet made the bridge unbearable with the uncovered roof. So they added roofs and all aircraft carriers now have roofs over their bridges. 

The island with a F-8 Crusader in the foreground. 

Up in the aircraft control room.

 The Hornet cost $69 million dollars ($930 million dollars today) and that investment very much so paid off. She served in three separate wars over the years and came under attack 59 times and never got hit by a bomb, torpedo, or by a deadly kamikaze.  I salute the men and women who served aboard her who helped to keep the liberty that we hold dearly. 

 Thanks for reading!

I hope you learned something new about the U.S.S Hornet (CV-12)!

Joshua