The Navy has deployed a salvage ship to the South China Sea to attempt to raise a sunken fighter and a helicopter that crashed off the USS Nimitz in back-to-back incidents in October. The USNS Salvor, operated by Military Sealift Command, is on-scene supporting recovering efforts, said Cmdr. Matthew Comer, 7th Fleet spokesman in Japan, in a statement by email Monday. The operation was first confirmed by CNN. The Navy did not reveal the location of the recovery mission. The aircraft — an F/A-18 Super Hornet jet and a MH-60 Seahawk helicopter — were lost Oct. 26 within a half hour of each other as the Nimitz, the Navy’s oldest carrier, was transiting the South China Sea. All five crew members survived. The Sea Hawk, assigned to Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 73, went down at approximately 2:45 p.m. during a routine operation from the Nimitz, according to the Navy. A half-hour later, a Super Hornet from Strike Fighter Squadron 22, based at Naval Air Station Lemoore, Calif., and assigned to the Nimitz, also went down during a routine operation, according to 7th Fleet. “Both crew members successfully ejected and were also safely recovered by search and rescue assets,” the Navy said. Mark Cancian, a former Marine officer and defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., said the attempt to salvage the jet and helicopter was “totally normal.” “We routinely go and salvage aircraft that crash,” Cancian said by phone Monday. “There was an F-35 that skidded off a deck; we went and got that one. A Marine helicopter was lost, and we went and got that one. The Brits did the same with an F-35 they lost.”
The reason is simple, Cancian said. The Navy will retrieve high-tech equipment before someone else does. “There are going to be electronics and materials on board that we don’t want our adversaries to get ahold of,” he said. Cancian said advances in underwater location-finding, as well as equipment to bring large items off the seabed, have significantly improved in the past few decades. “They know exactly where it is and exactly what they have to do to go get it,” Cancian said. The Nimitz is currently in the Western Pacific, headed east toward North America, according to the U.S. Naval Institute Fleet Tracker map. The carrier, which was commissioned in 1975, just days after the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War, is homeported at Naval Base Kitsap, Wash. The Nimitz deployed to the Indo-Pacific after departing Kitsap in March. The carrier and its strike group were sent to the Middle East in June as tensions escalated between Israel and Iran. The Nimitz moved east through the Indian Ocean and was in the South China Sea beginning Oct. 17. The Nimitz is scheduled to move to Naval Station Norfolk, Va., by May 2026 to begin decommissioning and eventually deactivate the ship.
About the Author
