(All images by US Navy via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
In the summer of 1967 the supercarrier USS Forrestal suffered a devastating fire while steaming through the Gulf of Tonkin. On July 29, as the massive ship’s air wing prepared for strikes against North Vietnamese targets, a Zuni rocket misfired from an F-4 Phantom and hit an armed A-4 Skyhawk parked on the deck’s port side. When the rocket ignited fuel pouring from the Skyhawk’s ruptured 400-gallon external tank, the inferno that followed destroyed 21 aircraft and killed 134 members of Forrestal’s crew. The total cost to the US Navy was $72 million. Senator John McCain, an A-4 pilot at the time, was among the survivors. This fire, however, wasn’t to be the last.
The public and personal tragedy served as a cautionary tale that reflected the perils of life on the busy and cluttered flight deck of an aircraft carrier. But two years later on January 14, 1969, disaster struck again, this time on the larger supercarrier USS Enterprise. Again, the culprit was a Zuni rocket misfiring from another F-4 Phantom.
The incident began when the exhaust from an aircraft starter unit caused the rocket to overheat, ultimately setting in motion a chain of 18 explosions that devastated Enterprise’s flight deck.
The initial blast perforated the F-4J Phantom’s fuel tanks, spraying burning JP-5 aviation fuel into the ship’s lower level compartments. Three minutes later, a bomb mounted beneath the blazing Phantom, by now completely engulfed in flames, exploded, blasting a hole of almost eight square-feet through the deck’s armour plating.
Silhouetted against a wall of flames is an F-4 Phantom, its twin canopies open to suggest the crew evacuated safely. To the left is an A-7 Corsair attack aircraft, its starboard undercarriage collapsed.
Secondary fires on the lower level fuelled yet more explosions as JP-5 poured in from above. When a 500-pound bomb and a rack of three Mk 82 general purpose munitions also went off, a chasm around 18 feet by 22 feet was torn through the flight deck, rupturing a 6,000-gallon fuel tank fitted to a tanker aircraft.
The ensuing fireball burned for four hours before emergency crews got it under control.
As Enterprise limped to Pearl Harbor for repairs, the damage was all too clear. The last of three major aircraft carrier blazes during the 1960s, the USS Enterprise fire cost the US Navy $126 million. Twenty-eight people were dead, 314 were injured and 15 aircraft were destroyed.
This series of images shows the fire as it unfolded, and its aftermath as burned-out aircraft hulks and other debris littered the charred flight deck.
Despite the destruction, it took just 51 days to repair the supercarrier, which re-entered service again thereafter.
The USS Enterprise fire of 1969 was one of three major aircraft carrier fires during that decade. The other blazes occurred aboard USS Forrestal in 1967 and USS Oriskany in 1966. Oriskany was eventually struck off charge in 1989 and scuttled as the world’s largest artificial reef in 2006.
This dramatic image shows the extent of the blaze on USS Enterprise’s stern, as the entire rear portion of the crippled carrier is engulfed in flames.
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