Deck Drawings
Whether it's a single letter or a 100-foot greeting, aircraft carrier crews stand ready to spell it out.
- By Roger Mola
- AirSpaceMag.com, May 27, 2011
US Navy
For a Naval carrier crew, there's no better way to spell pride and discipline than for hundreds of airmen and sailors to spell it out, shoulder to shoulder, on the flight deck.
Closing ranks in full white dress (or any other color), they write messages ranging from a single “E” for Excellence to 100-foot-long phrases. Some are done for fun, others for anniversaries or as salutes to fallen comrades. Here, sailors on the USS Enterprise mark the nuclear Navy’s 40th anniversary on their way back from the Middle East during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001.
The audience for these grand messages has ranged from the crews themselves to the landlubbers of distant ports of call, who nose to the windows of skyscrapers, or line the Golden Gate bridge, or scale the steep banks of Nova Scotia to see HELLO HALIFAX written in 50-foot letters, using 500 genuine feet.
It’s been going on for at least…actually, no one can say how long. Curtis Utz, head of the archives branch at the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, D.C, thinks the earliest descriptions of a flight-deck spell-out date from just after World War II. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t do it earlier,” says Utz.
His colleague Ed Finney is a curator in the Naval Historical Center photographic branch. “I don’t know if it’s what you’d call a tradition, it’s just been done for a long time,” he says. “At some point someone on deck probably figured We’ve got this huge, flat space, and it might be a good place to spell something. Maybe they got the idea from halftime shows at a football game.”
Either way, time on deck is better spent in spelling than swabbing.
See above for a gallery of aircraft carrier spell-outs.
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Comments (5)
Regarding deck drawings -- USS Ranger CV-61. When was this photo taken? My son was assigned and did duty on this ship during Desert Storm - 1991 and returned to San Diego. He doesn't recall this event. Please advise and thank you in advance. JDL
Posted by John Lucas on June 10,2011 | 02:07 PM
The Navy archive says that the original photo by Navy PH2 Wimmer was dated December 1, 1988, but may have been taken about a year earlier.
Posted by Roger Mola on June 16,2011 | 10:45 AM
Maybe I missed it in your collection of Deck Drawings, but I didn't see one of my favorites: the crew of the Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) spelling out "Big Stick."
I am pretty sure that "Big Stick" is a perfect description of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. Is that picture available?
Thanks.
Posted by Tim Colman on July 1,2011 | 03:48 PM
Thanks for your note. The "Big Stick" photo from September of 1999 is floating around the Internet and easy to find, and you're right, it's a great shot (especially since many schools no longer teach the cursive-style letters the crew used to spell it out). We collected dozens of images and it was tough to choose which to post. --Roger Mola, Researcher, Air & Space magazine
Posted by Roger Mola on July 7,2011 | 04:03 PM
There was a very famous article in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC in the Sixties profiling the Enterprise's around-the-world cruise. The "centerfold" was the aerial view of the ship with the sailors spelling out E=MC2 on the flight deck.
Posted by Stephen on February 25,2013 | 04:17 PM