By NINA PEACOCK
For the Star

Naval aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis sailed the Gulf of Alaska last week to participate in Northern Edge 2009, a joint forces training event held June 15 to June 26.

As the largest Northern Edge to date, 9,000 soldiers, airmen, guardsmen and sailors from the five military branches participated in two weeks of training exercises. The command center for the event was located at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

A plane takes off from the Stennis with the help of a launching mechanism.

Northern Edge takes 15 months to plan and occurs roughly every two years in Alaska.

The 244-foot tall, 1,104-foot long Stennis takes center stage in the military exercise. The gigantic aircraft carrier disperses 97 thousand tons of water and plunges 37 feet into the sea. It is powered by two nuclear reactors. Four propellers weighing 66,200 pounds each can move the ship 30 knots or more.

With 2,700 compartments, the ship can easily become a confusing maze. Sailors hustle up and down 19 stories of steep stairways to work, eat, and sleep. If the sailors’ mattresses were lined up, they would stretch to more than nine miles. Yet the beds and the sailors who sleep in them are all within a thousand feet of each other.

Chief Gus Langworthy, from North Pole, said living on the ship “is really like being on a floating city. There’s a barbershop, movies on TV, four galleys that are constantly operating, and always some kind of activity going on onboard. The only thing that’s difficult is being away from family for so long.”

The sailors are on sea for six months at a time.

Air Force airplanes are not equipped with the heavy equipment required to land on an aircraft carrier, so many of the joint exercises with the Navy and Marines were executed in the air.

A few exercises, however, brought airmen onto the aircraft carrier’s deck.

“We did a personal rescue with the Air Force where they had an airman in the water and our helicopters flew in and got him and brought him back to the ship,” said Cindy Fields, public affairs officer on the Stennis. “So if we were out there fighting a battle and we’re the closest to him, we could pick him up. We had not picked up an Air Force pilot and brought him on board before.”

Navy and Marine aircraft takeoffs and recoveries were executed from the flight deck of the Stennis. It took 30 men on deck to coordinate a launch, with many more working inside the ship’s control rooms and corridors.

Lt. Cmdr. Chuck Villegas, wearing a yellow shirt that reads “HANDLER,” coordinated the movement of planes on the flight deck from an indoor room last week. He moved miniature cardboard planes stuck with color-coordinated pins around a replica of the flight deck, referred to as the Ouija board.

Outside, the captain aligned the ship to into the wind so planes would be able to launch.

Meanwhile, Lt. Jamie Downs in a yellow “SHOOTER” shirt prepared airplanes for takeoff by hooking them onto a launching mechanism called a shuttle. The shuttle is part of the “cat,” a steam-driven catapult. When the cat is released, a 2-ton piston underneath the flight deck initiates the shuttle, pulling the airplane from zero to 150 miles per hour within 310 feet. The plane fires its engines just before it’s released, creating a tremendous roar and rumble on deck.

The crew launched nine to 15 aircrafts in a 15-minute session - eight to 10 times a day - during Northern Edge. The carrier can hold up to 80 airplanes.

“There are a lot of airplanes flying in this thing and you need an awful lot of airspace to do some of this stuff. It’s great to be able to do that,” said Stennis Capt. Joe Kuzmick. “I managed to get the ship up close so the crew could at least see Alaska. They saw the jagged mountains and the glaciers, and they felt like, ‘I really am here.’”

This article published in The Alaska Star on Thursday, July 2, 2009.