Carrier overhaul: USS Enterprise gets $200 million renovation.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

The Navy's oldest nuclear aircraft carrier just back from the war in Iraq--is undergoing a $200 million overhaul that will help her last at least another decade.

The USS Enterprise (CVN-65) sailed into the Northrop Grumman Newport News, Va., shipyard last September for nine months of maintenance work.

In many ways, it was another homecoming for the Enterprise which was hunched from the same shipyard in 1960. The ship--whose homeport is the nearby Norfolk Naval Base--has returned to Newport News periodically during the past four decades for routine maintenance, said Bob Gunter, Northrop Grumman's senior vice president for aircraft carriers.

In 1994, the carrier completed a major, four-year overhaul and refueling at Newport News. In 1999, she returned for additional maintenance. In 2002--after a tour in the Arabian Sea, where she became the first U.S. carrier to launch air strikes into Afghanistan--the ship sailed to Norfolk Naval Shipyard, located just across the James River in Portsmouth, Va., for more work. Although the Norfolk shipyard is owned by the Navy, this maintenance was performed by Northrop Grumman employees.

In 2003, the "Big E," as she is known to her crew, was back in the Persian Gulf. In 2004, the Enterprise deployed to the North Atlantic Ocean as part of Summer Pulse '04, a full-scale exercise. Then it was time to return to Newport News.

Many of the 600 shipyard employees involved in the Enterprise project have worked on the ship many times over the years, Gunter said.

This maintenance program, scheduled for completion in May, is comprehensive, officials said. It involves almost everything from the ship's stem to her stern nearly the length of four football fields and from the top of her mast to the bottom of her keel--the height of a 25-story building.

"I've got teams all over the place who are putting in new ducts, new flooring," the Enterprise's commanding officer, Capt. Larry Rice, told National Defense. "There's lots of painting going on."

Rice, a former F-14 fighter pilot, was the Enterprise's executive office in 1999.

The ship is eerily quiet while the work is going on, compared to the roar of normal carrier operations. Flight and hangar decks are crowded with construction personnel and equipment, rather than aircraft and their crews.

The entire air wing, with as many as 2,200 sailors and 85 combat aircraft, has been moved off the vessel. Almost all of the 3,300 members of the regular ship's crew--which includes 400...