SS America's Historian Bill Lee writes:

Closing out this year's correspondence about ship stuff with a little
shipyard trivia.

   Here's a photo from my AMERICA album - taken in 1954. It was part of the
shipyard's program to emphasize the size of the first super carrier (USS
FORRESTAL, CVA-59) and this print was used in the Daily Press that year, and has notations on the back in my Father's blue-penciled newspaper jargon. The accompanying newspaper account pointed out that (theoretically) both the UNITED STATES and the AMERICA could be placed side-by-side on the FORRESTAL's flight deck.
   The two biggest building docks at NNS, at the time, were side-by-side, and often the waterfront planners utilized a large model of the docks and the
cranes that serviced them in order to visualize tough building sequences. This
was, after all, long before computer visualizations were even thought of, and
models were much easier to study than plans. The shipyard model shop also had made some basic 'block' models of several ships as well, including the famous liners built there (and serviced annually, at the time). Before you ask, I have no idea whatever happened to all these 'toys'.
In the case of FORRESTAL, her flight deck (252 feet wide) was much wider than the dock she was built in, and the flight deck 'overhangs' had to be installed, one subassembly at a time, moving from aft to forward. Once each of those subassemblies was in place, the cranes could not go further aft again until the ship was structurally completed and floated out.
   In addition, the weight of those pieces was so great that cranes had to be
'ganged' together to make the lifts. And lastly, ships being placed in the
adjacent dock had to be located off center, to clear the starboard side overhang of a carrier under construction. At times when one of the supercarriers was being built or serviced in the larger of the two docks, the UNITED STATES had to be positioned 'off-center' so that her superstructure would clear a carrier's flight deck overhang. On those occasions, it seemed as if you could almost step from one ship to the other. Exciting times, for a then very young apprentice...
I don't recall that this photo has been seen in recent years - so I thought
it was time to share!

Happy Holidays!
Bill Lee                                                                                                        Return to  the SS America  or the SS United States