The USS America (CV-66) is an unusual page in the history of the United States Navy—part Cold War goliath, part engineering marvel, and ultimately the center of one of the most surreal endings a carrier ever experienced. Commissioned in 1965, she was a Kitty Hawk-class, destined to succeed the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise.
But when the Enterprise’s price went so high, the Navy made a practical choice: build America with traditional boilers. That decision made her one of the final conventionally powered supercarriers before the switch to all-nuclear carriers.
For over three decades, America was a faithful workhorse. She sailed across the Atlantic, across the Mediterranean, and into the Pacific. In the Vietnam War, her aircrews flew more than 10,000 combat sorties, released thousands of tons of ordnance, and never lost a single one of their planes to the foe, a record that spoke well of both ship and crew.
In the 1980s, she was working off the coast of Libya, where the Harpoon anti-ship missile made its combat premiere. Several years later, during Operation Desert Storm, her jets completed over 3,000 missions against Iraqi troops.
But her purpose wasn’t limited to waging war. America was available for humanitarian missions, crisis evacuations, and numerous other tasks that required a capable, versatile ship. Crewmembers who spent time on her remember the perpetually humming engines, the ear-shattering roar of planes taking off, and the inescapable sense of responsibility that existed with a job on the flight deck—where discipline and perfection were the only differences between an average day and disaster.
By the mid-1990s, the post-Cold War drawdown had arrived hard. While sister ships Kitty Hawk and Constellation were treated to expensive life-extension overhauls, America was not. She was decommissioned in 1996 and shipped out to the Philadelphia Naval Inactive Ships Facility, where she lay idle for nearly a decade. Many had anticipated she would be preserved as a museum ship, but the Navy had other intentions.
In 2005, America was quietly taken out into the Atlantic and secretly tested with a code-named SinkEx. The concept was to see how a new carrier would behave when subjected to continuous battle damage—and gather data that would inform the design of future carriers. She took hit after hit for four weeks: bombs, missiles, underwater explosions intended to mimic torpedo attacks.
To everyone’s astonishment, America would not give up. Her double hull and gigantic internal structure took the pounding. Even at its worst, she stayed afloat. Navy sailors finally had to board her and place demolition charges inside to push her underwater.
She went down at 11:30 a.m. on May 14, 2005, gliding beneath the waves, coming to rest standing upright nearly 17,000 feet below, somewhere between Bermuda and South Carolina. She was the largest warship ever intentionally sunk—and the only modern American supercarrier so designated.
The lesson of her last mission was simple: it is far more complicated to sink a carrier with conventional payloads than most realize, especially when it’s refueled, armed, and manned. America’s loss was factored into the lessons of building the next carriers, which were strengthened and prepared for the worst.
Today, the USS America rests far beneath the Atlantic. She is lost from view, but her story is still a reminder that there are some ships not built to serve, but to fight to the end.