Word: nimitz
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...touchdown, if all goes well, a hook on the underside of the jet's tail grapples one of four cables strung a few inches over the flight deck, and the aircraft is yanked to a lurching halt. At 11:51 last Tuesday night, aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, that difficult maneuver went terribly awry...
...nuclear-powered U.S.S. Nimitz, at 91,400 tons the world's biggest warship, sailed imperiously in the calm Atlantic waters 60 miles off the Florida coast. On its 4½-acre deck, even as midnight approached, sailors and their officers worked amid a terrific din of pumps and engines and catapults. The ship was headed into a balmy wind, and a soft mist hung in the night air. Thirteen of the carrier's jets were still out on a routine training run. The pilot of one, an electronic radar-jamming EA-6B Prowler, had his plane a scant...
...Grumman-built Prowler dropped in for touchdown, the Nimitz's landing signal officer, in charge of directing aircraft approaches, saw that it was too high and swinging dangerously leftward-and then too far right. By radio he ordered the pilot to gun his engines and fly clear of the deck, a routine procedure for aborted landings. But Marine Lieut. Steven E. White, 27, did not-perhaps could not-obey. His plane skidded at 145 m.p.h. onto the flight deck past the last of the arresting cables and caromed some 500 ft., its right wing lopping chunks off parked jets...
Anyone who has watched night operations from the bridge of the Enterprise or the Nimitz can claim to have witnessed the most dramatic spectacle of men and machines short of actual war. It is no wonder that a pivotal point in the new defense planning concerns aircraft carriers and the related idea of recommissioned battleships turned into platforms for cruise missiles...
With so many longtime critics of military spending ousted from Congress last fall, there were few left to question last week's defense bonanza. Democratic Senator Gary Hart argued against the expensive Nimitz carrier in favor of lighter, less expensive models. Republican Mark Hatfield, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, promises to push for some type of arms limitation agreement. Says Hatfield: "We're spending and building first before seeing if there is a method of obviating the need for that buildup. It's unnecessary and it's dangerous...