The USS America (CV-66) holds a unique position in the history of the American Navy—a Cold War giant, an engineering wonder, and finally the main lady in one of the most bizarre endings any carrier ever received. Commissioned in 1965 as part of the Kitty Hawk class to replace the pioneering but expensive nuclear-powered USS Enterprise.
Since Enterprise’s stratospheric cost was out of the question, the Navy defaulted to a more pragmatic option in America, which was equipped with conventional boilers rather than nuclear power. This made her one of the last conventionally powered supercarriers before the Navy went entirely nuclear.
Over three decades, America was tested time and again. She crossed the Atlantic, fought in the Mediterranean, and pushed into the Pacific. During the Vietnam War, her pilots flew over 10,000 combat missions, delivering thousands of tons of ordnance. Astonishingly, not a single one of her planes was lost to enemy fire during that war—a tribute to the ship and to her crew.
In the 1980s, she operated out of Libya, where the Harpoon anti-ship missile was first used in combat. Subsequently, during Operation Desert Storm, her air wing flew more than 3,000 missions against Iraq.
But there was not only combat in America’s war history. She participated in humanitarian relief missions, evacuations, and crisis response. Sailors who served aboard her tend to remember the steady rumble of the engines, the ear-splitting roar of jets leaving the deck, and the hair’s breadth margin for disaster on the flight deck, where discipline and teamwork held danger at bay.
By the mid-1990s, however, the post-Cold War drawdown finally caught up with America. While ships like Kitty Hawk and Constellation were given costly refits to lengthen their service lives, America was ignored. She retired in 1996 and relocated to the Philadelphia inactive reserve. Groups campaigned to save her as a museum, but the Navy had other ideas.
In 2005, the ship was secretly taken into the Atlantic for a secret test called SinkEx. The rationale was blunt but necessary: see how an advanced carrier would stand up to severe battle damage, and apply that lesson to build more resilient ships going forward. America took four weeks of merciless battering—bombs, missiles, and explosions beneath its decks intended to simulate torpedoes.
What amazed onlookers was how long she survived. Her double-hull design and enormous interior volume absorbed blow after blow. Even listing and battered, she continued to resist sinking. It wasn’t until Navy demo crews boarded the vessel and set explosives within her that she eventually went down.
At 11:30 a.m. on May 14, 2005, America went down into the deep, resting upright almost 17,000 feet beneath the surface between South Carolina and Bermuda. She was the biggest warship ever deliberately sunk—and the sole contemporary American supercarrier so disposed.
Her final mission sent a strong message: it is much more difficult to destroy a fully-strength, fueled, and armed carrier with conventional ammunition than some may think. What she did there was borrow straight from her sacrifice and apply it in future carriers’ development, which were made even more resilient at war.
Today, the USS America lies quietly at the bottom of the sea. She no longer sails, but her tale lives on—a reminder of the fact that there are ships constructed not only to serve, but to last until the end.