Sold For $1! USS Kitty Hawk Sails 16,000 Miles To Scrapyard

It was once the biggest symbol of American military power in the Indo-Pacific, battle-tested from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf and a survivor of a collision with a Soviet submarine, Brad Lendon reported for CNN.

Photo Insert: The USS Kitty Hawk was the last US aircraft carrier fueled by oil, a relic of an era before the arrival of nuclear-powered Nimitz-class ships.

But the glory days of the former USS Kitty Hawk are over, and the retired supercarrier is on its final, 16,000-mile journey from Washington state to Texas, where it will be cut up and sold for scrap.

International Shipbreaking Ltd. of Brownsville, Texas, bought the ship last year for less than a dollar from US Naval Sea Systems Command, which oversees the disposal of retired warships.

The 1,047-foot long, 252-foot wide carrier is too big to go through the Panama Canal, so in the coming months, Kitty Hawk will creep along the South American coastline from Naval Base Kitsap-Bremerton, Washington, and up through the Gulf of Mexico to its final destination.

Launched in 1960 and named after the North Carolina area where the Wright Brothers first flew a powered airplane, Kitty Hawk served the US Navy for almost 50 years before it was decommissioned in 2009. Kitty Hawk was the last US aircraft carrier fueled by oil, a relic of an era before the arrival of nuclear-powered Nimitz-class ships.

For a decade from the early 1960s, Kitty Hawk was a mainstay of the US force off the coast of Vietnam. At times, its aircraft flew more than 100 sorties a day over Vietnam from what was called Yankee Station, the area of the South China Sea where US naval vessels steamed to launch strikes against North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces.

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