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Homeward Bound

Kitty Hawk is on her way home, finally.

After 10 years of being forward-deployed and two months of wandering around the Pacific, the Kitty Hawk will finally pull into San Diego on Aug. 7. It will be 10 years, one month and a day from when she departed San Diego — the last time on July 6, 1998, to meet the carrier Independence in Pearl Harbor.

But I don’t think it has set in quite yet.

For the last two days, the ship has been offloading ammunition, a three-day job that got done in two.

Now all efforts are in preparing for the turnover with the carrier George Washington and the long-awaited trek North to Bremerton, Washington, for her final decommissioning.

It was a seemingly routine departure from Pearl Harbor on Aug. 1 after hosting the final wrap-up party for the semiannual Rim of the Pacific exercise. But shortly after clearing the narrow channel and hitting open water, the ship encountered the guided missile destroyer Chafee heading in the opposite direction.

Those on deck of the smaller ship snapped to attention as they came alongside the Kitty Hawk and the carrier returned the salute — a final reminder that this is most likely the final time the ship will visit the Hawaiian Islands.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, but it ended up in as close to a storybook ending as a carrier can get. The May fire onboard the carrier George Washington forced Kitty Hawk to make an unscheduled stop in Guam and then train up to be the center attraction for the RIMPAC exercise. During the exercise, “The Hawk” was host to the Canadian admiral and had 1,456 carrier arrested landings, bringing the ship’s career total to 407,491– still third on the Navy’s all-time list, behind Lexington and Independence.

But RIMPAC allowed the ship to hit another milestone. On July 26, the ship’s catapult No. 3 shot its 100,000th catapult shot. That’s right, Catapult 3 on the ship’s waist — you know, the one that shoots off the angle.

Normally only a carrier’s bow catapults reach this kind of milestone and in fact, the crew believes that, till now, no carrier has ever shot that number of aircraft off its midship cats.

“From what we can tell, this is the first time a ship has reached this number on a waist cat,” said Cmdr. John Kurtz, Kitty Hawk’s air boss.

But the ship will have all of eternity to rest on that laurel. The final fly-off is next on the horizon. There will be a short tune-up Aug. 5, when the ship will fly one long cycle to get the kinks out before flying off all Air Wing Five’s fixed-wing aircraft on the 6th. The helicopters will leave the following morning as the ship gets closer to San Diego Harbor.

But the question remains — will all of the aircraft make it off on the final run? Will the maintenance crews get all the aircraft up and running in time to make the final push? Well, now, that seems to be the only question unanswered for the Kitty Hawk.

Stay tuned for the answer.