Comments: - - I was the first Nimitz Master Helmsman qualifed in 1975 and steered Nimitz into every Navy port, anchorage, and brought her alongside all of the supply ships during Nimitz's first two years. I appreciated seeing my old helm and engine order telegraph in your video. I always wondered what hat to the spoked helm wheel. That was the second helm wheel. The first was a steel grey one with a thick band around the outside. The spoked wheel replaced it but was impractical. Too big but good ol Navy tradition. Was replaced by a wooden rimmed all brass helm wheel with USS Nimitz on it. That was the last one I steered with. I have a great story about a near collision we had south of Cuba. How's do I contact you?

To give people a sense of how powerful a nuclear carrier really is consider this. Back when I was on the Numbnutz(affectionately) while stationed in Bremerton Wa back in the early 90's...there was a city wide power outage. The base had no power as the plant was down for some reason. We "lit off" one of our four reactors and back fed power into the grid and ran PSNS for a couple days. ONE of four... Also, the "flag" is basically a passenger. He has his own staff, bridge and whatnot. The ships CO actually has command of the ship, the Admiral runs the entire battle group. Carriers are cool but their size gets old while on deployment. You stand in line for EVERYTHING, they're deep draft so you can't get into smaller ports and are nuclear powered so some countries won't even allow you to pull in. I MUCH preferred my time on smaller cruisers and destroyers. You knew the entire ship, most of the crew and could pull into smaller ports of call over seas. Oh...I'll almost guarantee most of those old machine shop lathes etc...are never used and no one even knows how to use them. As you can see...they're freshly painted and it's all very clean. BUT...there's really no practical way to remove them as they were installed then the ship built around them. Yeah they weld and may do some very minor machining but anything beyond basic stuff is done at a "depot" maintenance shop on shore and then flown out.

That "radar airplane" that you see my friend is probably the most important thing in that entire carrier strike group. Its called the E-2 Hawkeye and it is what allows the ships to overcome the radar horizon limitation (25-30 nautical miles) and see far further out (200-300 nautical miles) by having it fly high. It also allows the ships of the group to keep their radars off and remain silent, avoiding passive detection by the enemy.