Sunday, February 5th, 2006 - The USS Lexington

We took advantage of the fact that the traffic on Sunday mornings is typically less than workdays (or even Saturday) by driving straight through downtown Corpus Christi and across one arm of the bay to the USS Lexington, a WWII aircraft carrier that after 50 years of service had been converted into a floating museum. We spent about 6 hours wandering around the ship and touring the flight deck, the bridge, the engine room, the forecastle, the mess hall, and pretty much everything they permitted us access to. I had a blast and even Monika enjoyed it.

The entrance to the ship is on the old hangar deck, where they had located quite a few exhibits. You could even take a ride in a flight simulator if that tickled your fancy sufficiently to pay the $4 special fee. We enjoyed the torpedo plane exhibit and some of the older aircraft including the "Yellow Peril" biplane that was the Navy's primary flight trainer during the 1930s, I believe.

The flight deck had more modern aircraft including several jets, an Apache helicopter, and one lone propeller driven T34 trainer. Originally, the Lexington was a "straight deck" carrier, but after WWII they had modified the flight deck into the more modern "Y" shape. That way the catapults could still launch aircraft out over the bow for take offs, while other planes could simultaneously come in and land at the angled runway that kind of crosses from the stern over to other side. With that modification the Lexington served for another 40 years or so for basic carrier training for all Navy pilots. All total the Lexington was in service from 1942 to 1992, a service record that I imagine is very rare in these days of rapidly changing technology.

In the rear auditorium we saw a movie entitled "Fighter Pilot" that focused on the Operation Red Flag flight training exercises. I thought that was very well done and gave a good first-hand glimpse into the final stage of training for our current crop of fighter pilots. I was surprised by exactly how good the computer graphics were in the AWACs control plane, and by how life like the whole exercise was. The aim of the realistic training is to get more pilots safely past the first 10 sorties in a real war, where the casualty rate is so appallingly high, especially if the enemy forces are also well equipped and well trained. But maintaining air superiority is essential because without it our losses of ground forces would simply be horrendous. In any case, it was nice to see that the old ship had been converted to a museum rather than scrapped or sunk for a reef. Somehow I imagined that having kids running all over the place and learning about aviation and history all at the same time was a destiny that the ship, if it had a soul, could reasonably accept.

Although we wandered around pretty much the whole day, I expect that folks with less interest in aviation, history, or the Navy could take in the Lexington in just an hour or two. We left late in the afternoon and then stopped off so that Monika could buy groceries. I kept sniffing around for some solar panels to help charge our batteries and at last a clerk at Circuit City said he thought Harbor Freight had some. Sure enough, when we checked out that rumor we did indeed find small, trickle-charge models on sale for $12. We couldn't resist that and bought two on the spot.

That delayed us enough that we missed some of the first quarter of the Super Bowl, tuning in with our battery-powered TV just in time to see the first field goal by the Seattle Seahawks. It turned out to be a good game, much less one-sided than some of the Super Bowls I had seen in the past, but in the end the Pittsburgh Steelers won and we turned in for the night.