If there is something that has always fascinated me, it must be hangar ships. They are enormous - populated by app. 6,000 people when at sea. Even though these ships seem very long when you walk on their deck, they are very short to land a jet plane on, but somehow the pilots manage.

Yesterday I was on board the USS Intrepid (pictures above and below), a hangar ship, which served just before and during WWII, during the Vietnam War, and during the Space Race. During WWII, the USS Intrepid was attacked numerous times by Japanese Kamikaze pilots, but survived all attacks, however, at casualties.

Today it is an Air Space museum complex, consisting of the hangar ship itself, the USS Intrepid, another military ship, a submarine, numerous aircrafts on the deck of the Intrepid and the Concorde (below).

I made some remarks on 9-11 before, in conjunction with the picture of the New York Stock Exchange. 9-11 comes to the surface again, when you are on board the USS Intrepid; on the ship, a (short) film about 9-11 and the aftermath is running every half-hour. The main focus of the film is the US Forces stationed abroad, and what they do to defend freedom and America, which, to some extent anyway, tells us something about how much this event still represents in the mind of an American - which, by the way, is also reflected in the Presidential Campaign.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2004 at 1:53 am and is filed under New York City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.