Enterprise to return Sunday

[Sailor]

Enterprise to return Sunday after final deployment

NORFOLK

The aircraft carrier Enterprise and some 5,500 sailors and Marines will return to Norfolk Naval Station on Sunday as the 51-year-old ship completes its 25th and final deployment.

The world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier will be inactivated on Dec. 1 during a ceremony at the naval station before heading next year to the Newport News shipyard that will start dismantling it.

"This has not been a victory lap for Enterprise by any means," Rear Adm. Ted Carter, commander of the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, said this month in an interview with The Virginian-Pilot aboard the ship. "This has been a full-on combat operation."

During a near eight-month mission that sent the ship and its strike group through the Gulf of Aden and the North Arabian Sea, the Enterprise steamed 80,968 miles and launched more than 8,000 sorties, including 2,241 combat flights over Afghanistan.

The carrier will dock at Mayport Naval Station in Florida this week before steaming toward Norfolk.

The first members of the strike group returned to Norfolk on Tuesday afternoon. Two C-2A Greyhounds and 40 sailors attached to the ship landed at Chambers Field. The planes had delivered cargo and people to and from the ship.

hamptonroads.com/2012/10/enterprise-return-sunday-after-final-deployment

[Sailor]

The USS Enterprise is the nation's oldest active duty warship, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and a history-making symbol of America's naval might for half a century.

But it's now headed for the scrap heap.

Virtually all the weapons and ammunition has been off loaded. By the end of the week, it'll make its final return to its home port of Norfolk, Virginia. On Dec. 1, "The Big E" will be become officially inactive.

But one doesn't just take an aircraft carrier with eight nuclear reactors in its hold and park it somewhere. The Navy will spend three years and tens of millions of dollars removing the ship's radioactive fuel and reactors before cutting it into scrap.

More here:
us.cnn.com/2012/11/01/us/enterprise-scrap/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

[dustdevil28]

All things come to an end.

Thanks for your service and the endless memories of hundreds of thousands of Sailors who must have served on that ship at one point or another.

Amazing.

-DD

[Sailor]

I like this saying ... "There's tough, and then there's Enterprise tough."

The end of an era.