USS Kitty Hawk headed for scrapyard in Texas after being sold for 1¢

The USS Kitty Hawk, which was decommissioned in 2009 and was the Navy’s last oil-fired aircraft carrier, this week began its last voyage on the sea, destined for a scrapyard in Texas.

“A final goodbye,” the Navy tweeted on Tuesday. “The ex-USS Kitty Hawk is towed from Bremerton, Washington, to a ship-breaking facility in Brownsville, Texas.”

The Kitty Hawk was in operation for 48 years before it was decommissioned, and spent the last decade or so at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

The ship completed six tours of duty in Vietnam, and was deployed to Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan in the last decade of operation.

All those years of service severely lowered the final sale price for the ship. The Navy Times cited the U.S. Naval Institute, which said it was built for $264 million in 1961, the equivalent of $2.5 billion in today’s dollars.

But the scrap company in Texas bought it for 1 penny, and another penny allowed it to pick up the USS John F. Kennedy.

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