The US Navy sold 2 obsolete aircraft carriers to scrap dealers for a cent each (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The US Navy sold 2 obsolete aircraft carriers to scrap dealers for a cent each (2021)

businessinsider.com

14 pointsthunderbong18 comments

Old boats are a HAZMAT nightmare.

Assuming you need to do everything responsibly and above board, you may get paid for the scrap, but you need to pay to remove and dispose of pipe lagging, fuel and lubricant residue, separate and recycle various materials and W.H.Y.

I don't know about the US Navy but if they have to account for the proper disposal of everything in those ships, that's a gigantic task and selling them for a penny may well be an excellent deal.

A tangential thing:

Where I am, on the BC coast, I'm told the old way to dispose of old vessels (including commercial) was to scuttle them somewhere quiet.

There was a startup out here that was offering, for a fee, to responsibly dismantle boats and sort through everything and responsibly recycle or dispose of everything. What the owner would get is a paper trail, especially weigh-bills, showing their ship disappeared in a legal way. I believe it failed because of the cost.

Exactly. The cost to remediate the hazmat stuff as the carrier is disassembled allows the scrap yard to make a profit, but it's not getting "free money" from the government.

When the aircraft carrier Oriskany was sunk as an artificial reef, the environmental remediation cost was $11.89 million.

> Towing and ship-breaking is a costly process, and the Navy has previously paid ISL large sums of money to recycle its ships

Ship breaking is a nasty business. These carriers went to Texas. Commercial ships, cruise ships, and oil drilling platforms often end up in India:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Rwpp171mS4U9TFcE7

Article is from 2021 (this information should be in the title).

I spent a couple of years aboard the kitty Hawk in the early 1980s..rode her from California to Hawaii to Arabia and back, with many stops along the way

They should be auctioning it off to the highest bidders. Hard to believe the one cents offers were the highest.

You usually have to pay money to get rid of batteries or larger stuff like TVs and especially toxic stuff. One cent probably was the highest bid.

A paintball tournament company might be willing to go up to 5 cents for it.

The US Navy sold 2 obsolete carriers

In the world of 2023, ALL carriers are obsolete. The way as all battleships were obsolete in 1941.

Aircraft carriers = slow, expensive targets.

They are not slow, they ca do more than 40 miles per hour. You think it's that easy to hit a target that travels at 40 mph somewhere 1000 miles out in the ocean? Yes, I know, you have some super-duper hypersonic scary aircraft carrier killer things. It's still not easy to even locate an aircraft carrier 1000 miles away, to say nothing about tracking it and accurately doing course corrections on a hypersonic missile, all while defeating electronic warfare countermeasures.

Wow! 40 miles an hour! So fast! Give that carrier 5 hours start. What's that? A mere 200 miles.

A hypersonic anti-shipping missile goes roughly 6000 miles an hour. So that missile would catch up that huge 200 miles in 2 miserable little minutes.

Now, final manoeuvring. The carrier's biggest drawback is its size. Everything else is tiny in comparison. And it will be in the middle of a (hugely visible on radar) Carrier Group.

So if you want to hit a carrier, just aim for the largest return in the middle of that very conspicuous Carrier Group.

Things are so easy on paper, aren't they? Who is exactly going to locate the aircraft carrier? A drone, an airplane, a satellite? Once they locate and the missile is launched, will they be able to keep in contact? Will they be able to maintain eyes on target? Pro tip: you can't launch a hypersonic missile from any point in the world and do it in a way that the US Navy has no clue about that. Once the launch happens, it's game on. Satellites are blinded by lasers, smoke screens are deployed, also decoys with similar radar signatures as warships [1]. Any spotting drone or airplane is as good as dead. Given that, 40 miles per hour is actually fast. In 10 minutes the carrier can be 8 miles away from the initial point. It does not need to be that far, one mile is enough, even if the hypersonic missile has a nuclear warhead.

And by the way, did the Chinese ever demonstrate they can hit a target at sea one thousand miles away?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SLQ-49_Chaff_Buoy_Decoy_Sys...

Just keep on believing that, if it makes you feel safe.

And just in case you're still in need of a citation:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37662/chinese-long-ran...

Thanks for the citation, but there's about zero evidence that they've hit anything.

Aircraft carriers are what gives the US global military dominance. They are moving airports, moving cities, moving military bases that can be positioned within bombing range of anywhere in the world and they are usually flanked by a few nuclear subs. Most fighter jets have a range of less than 2000 miles so you need the moveable airports.

The fact that aircraft carriers are slow is irrelevant, you won't ever get close enough to fire on them.

The fact that aircraft carriers are slow is irrelevant, you won't ever get close enough to fire on them.

Shhh!. Don't look now, but the range of most carrier-based planes is roughly 800 miles. (The much-vaunted F35 is reported to have a range of only about 600* miles.) Many anti-shipping missiles have a range greater than 1000 miles. You do the math.

* https://www.quora.com/Is-the-F-35Bs-combat-radius-450-550nm-...

You're talking cruise missiles, right? The AGM-158C is only good for 500 miles

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