All you need to know about Fleet Week. Except the ships.
March 18th, 2010 | Life at Sea Maritime operations Morale | Posted by Phil Ewing
Friendly neighborhood Spider-Men are just one of the attractions for sailors and Marines participating in this year's Fleet Week in New York // SN Kevin Murray Jr. / Navy
Navy Region Mid-Atlantic burst onto the scene Thursday with a multi-platform social networking explosion designed to start the hype for this year’s Fleet Week up in New York — yes, the one made infamous by “Sex and the City.” There’s a Web site, there’s a Facebook page, there’s a Flickr page; you can even look for #fltwkny if you’re following @NavyPAO on the Tweets. Just one problem: the Navy apparently hasn’t decided which ships it’s sending.
Even though the announcement proclaimed that “approximately 3,000 Sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen will descend upon the city,” it neglected to mention how they’ll all get there. Never fear — Navy sources tell Scoop Deck to expect a full list of the ships involved in Fleet Week about 30 days before it starts May 26.
In all likelihood, the Navy will send a big-deck amphibious ship, a cruiser, a destroyer and maybe a couple of other smaller ships. Last year included two patrol coastal ships; could this year include the littoral combat ship Independence? (It will be cooling out for the next few months in Norfolk, Va.)
It’s a cinch which ships won’t be there, though: New York has some kind of ban — maybe informal, maybe not — on visits from nuclear-powered ships. Even though the city’s mayors keep saying they’d have no problem with a carrier or a submarine visiting as part of Fleet Week, the Navy is probably not going to test that.