That was another reason Melka thought the ship should become a museum. In the ship’s early days, it took part in the Vietnam War. Kitty Hawk supported Operation Iraqi Freedom from March 19 until April 18, 2003, as well as an 83-day deployment in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, according to the Navy’s ship history. The former Kitty Hawk commissioned on Apand served just over 48 years before its decommissioning on May 12, 2009, when it headed to the Navy’s Inactive Ships Maintenance Facility in Bremerton, Wash. They won’t be able to see the actual ship and be able to walk on it.” “Nobody’s gonna know … what a Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carrier was,” Melka said. He thought the veterans association would at least have a chance to save their ship.
The chances of the decommissioned aircraft carrier becoming a museum were already dashed in 2018, when Melka received a letter from the Navy saying that the ship was never destined to be a museum. It will be hard for Melka and others in the Kitty Hawk Veterans Association to see the ship, where they lived for years during service in the U.S. Kennedy (CV-67), Naval Sea Systems Command told USNI News. International Shipbreaking Limited will tow, remediate, dismantle and recycle Kitty Hawk, as well as the former USS John F. But the plans of USS Kitty Hawk Veterans Association, of which Melka is president, received the final blow last month when the Navy sold the ship to International Shipbreaking Limited in Brownsville, Texas for a penny on Sept. He spent many more trying to turn the decommissioned ship into a museum. Melka spent three and a half years – the majority of his Navy career – aboard Kitty Hawk as a boilerman in the boiler room. “And after even after leaving there, you know I still have a connection with that ship. “And when you spend that much time and work that hard seven days a week near sea you learn to love the place,” Melka told USNI News recently. The ship’s size might be what Melka remembers first about the Kitty Hawk, but what draws him to it all these years later is the sense of belonging. For 70 years after, until his death, Melka’s father, who had served in the Navy during World War II, talked about the ship’s size. That’s also how it was for his father, who visited Kitty Hawk while Melka served in the Navy. More than 50 years after he left the ship, the size of it still sticks with Melka. It was “amazing” to walk onto the ship, then just four years into its service life, via its gangplank, Melka recalled.Īt 1,047 feet, the former USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) is almost the length of three football fields. When James Melka first approached USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63), he had no idea the size of the aircraft carrier.Īs the 17-year-old walked toward the pier in 1965, he could see the big gray ship, growing larger as he approached. The former USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) gets underway from its homeport at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan in 2004.
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