America’s first supercarrier museum ship?
October 29th, 2009 | Aviation Carriers Historical | Posted by Phil Ewing
The decommissioned carrier Ranger, seen here at sea in its glory days, could become a museum ship in Portland, Ore. // Naval History and Heritage Command
World War II carrier museums are all well and good, but for five decades naval aviation has been about the supercarrier — the big, angled deck, steam catapult-equipped monsters whose era began with the commissioning of the Forrestal in 1955. (Earlier flattops were retrofitted with steam cats. ) But even though many of those big ships are out of the fleet, your Cub Scout pack can’t do a sleep-over on one. Yet.
However, Portland, Ore.-area scouts and other propeller-heads can take heart about the news Thursday that the USS Ranger Foundation cleared the first of four hurdles with Naval Sea Systems Command to bring the decommissioned carrier Ranger to a berth on the Willamette River. It’s no small undertaking: The group still must raise money, find a suitable spot, tow the ship from Bremerton, Wash., and get it safe and set up to accept visitors and exhibits.
Getting and running a museum ship is really tough. Navy Times has reported on case after case — such as with the carrier John F. Kennedy — in which organizations’ vision far exceeded their ability to raise money or make the necessary deals. Still, if you have a waterfront somewhere you’d like to spruce it up with some haze-gray decoration, here’s NavSea’s list of ships available to become museums, including the famous Sea Shadow, the cruiser Ticonderoga (pdf) and even another supercarrier, the Saratoga. (pdf)
With the Ranger news peg, this Vietnam-era image of the Ranger and Task Force 77 is too good not to display:
Naval History and Heritage Command
Comments
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Mike Burleson Says:
October 29th, 2009 at 4:07 pmGood luck! Here in SC we are having to pay $100 million to repair the 1/3 size USS Yorktown. Look before you leap.
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Greg Stitz Says:
October 30th, 2009 at 10:33 amWhile preserving Ranger may seem like a good idea, don’t forget that USS MIDWAY (CV-41) is now a museum ship in San Diego (and doing very well, I understand), so Cold War and Vietnam-era aviation is already being preserved and displayed.
I hope that the Ranger Foundation people have, or will, visit ALL the carrier museums, and even some of the folks at the musuems that have bigger ships and learn about some of the challenges.
In the Navy’s defense, they have gotten MUCH tougher on museums (as evidenced by their involvement in the LAFFEY / YORKTOWN situations) and the much slower pace of donations in the past 10-15 years.
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The Scoop Deck – Portland gets cold feet Says:
September 14th, 2010 at 9:31 am[...] are dark times for the world of naval museum ships: Plans to make the retired carriers Ranger and Saratoga into waterfront attractions seem to be going nowhere; Adm. George Dewey’s flagship, the cruiser Olympia, is set to close [...]