USS Ranger (CV-61)

Coordinates: 47°33′09″N 122°39′09″W / 47.5525°N 122.6524°W / 47.5525; -122.6524 (USS Ranger (CV-61))

The seventh USS Ranger (CV/CVA-61) was one of four Forrestal-class supercarriers built for the United States Navy in the 1950s. Although all four ships of the class were completed with angled decks, Ranger had the distinction of being the first US carrier built from the beginning as an angled-deck ship.

Commissioned in 1957, she served extensively in the Pacific, especially the Vietnam War, for which she earned 13 battle stars. Near the end of her career, she also served in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.

Ranger appeared on television in The Six Million Dollar Man and Baa Baa Black Sheep, and in the films Top Gun, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (standing in for the carrier Enterprise), and Flight of the Intruder.

Ranger was decommissioned in 1993, and was stored at Bremerton, Washington until March 2015. She is currently being scrapped in Brownsville.

Construction and trials

USS Ranger

USS Ranger may refer to:

USS Ranger (1814)

USS Ranger was an armed schooner that served in the U.S. Navy from 1814 to 1816.

Ranger, probably a former privateer, was purchased in Baltimore, Maryland, in March 1814. She was used as a lookout vessel in Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812. She was sold in Baltimore in 1816.

References

This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. The entry can be found here.

USS Ranger (CV-4)

USS Ranger (CV-4) was the first ship of the United States Navy to be designed and built from the keel up as an aircraft carrier. Ranger was a relatively small ship, closer in size and displacement to the first US carrier—Langley—than later ships. An island superstructure was not included in the original design, but was added after completion. Deemed too slow for use with the Pacific Fleet's carrier task forces, the ship spent most of the war in the Atlantic Ocean.

Construction

Ranger was laid down on 26 September 1931 by the Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co., Newport News, Virginia, launched on 25 February 1933, sponsored by Lou Henry Hoover (the wife of the President of the United States), and commissioned at the Norfolk Navy Yard on 4 June 1934, with Captain Arthur L. Bristol in command.

Service history

Inter-war period

Ranger conducted her initial flight operations off the Virginia Capes on 21 June 1934 and departed Norfolk on 17 August for a shakedown training cruise that took her to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. She returned to Norfolk on 4 October for operations off the Virginia Capes and two stints in dry dock for post trial repairs until 1 April 1935, when she sailed for the Pacific. Transiting the Panama Canal on 7 April, she arrived in San Diego on 15 April. For nearly four years, she participated in fleet problems reaching to Hawaii, the first-ever carrier cold weather test trials in Alaska, and in western seaboard operations that took her as far south as Callao, Peru, and as far north as Seattle, Washington. On 4 January 1939, she departed San Diego for winter fleet operations in the Caribbean based at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. She then steamed north to Norfolk, arriving on 20 April.