Despite an effort to save the USS Ranger and turn it into a museum, the Navy aircraft carrier once known as the “Top Gun of the Pacific” is heading to the scrapyard, Military.com reports.
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Military.com’s Ed Friedwrich writes:
The Navy announced a deal Dec. 22 to pay International Shipbreaking a penny and the value of the ship’s scrap metal to take it away. It must make a five-month, 16,000-mile trip around South America because it can’t fit through the Panama Canal. Crosby Tugs of Golden Meadow, La., has been contracted to tow it.
A Navy spokesman confirmed to Military.com the ship would towed away on Thursday from Bremerton, Wash. The decommissioned ship will be dismantled in Brownsville, Texas.
As WATM’s Orvelin Valle previously reported, the Navy kept the Ranger on standby from 1993 to 2004 for possible reactivation until the carrier was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register, and redesigned for donation. Unfortunately, no group put up the funding or plans to have the ship converted a museum or memorial during that time.
The Ranger appeared in television shows such as “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “Black Sheep Squadron,” as well as the films “Top Gun,” “Star Trek IV,” “Flight of the Intruder.”
There was some effort made to try and save the ship, to include an online petition.
“We know that saving the USS Ranger would have significantly more far-reaching economic, historic and social benefits than scrapping it,” Michael B. Shanahan, a leader of the effort to save the ship, said in a statement. “This is our last chance to stop the loss of an irreplaceable cultural and historic asset.”