USS Midway - A seagoing icosikaidigon you have to land on!

and so ladies and gentlemen there are only three ships left to look at in the 2022 USA America Tour by me this is the third to last the USS Midway absolutely wonderful ship based in San Diego so this is the view you get if you're approaching her from the south from the area with most of the immediately accessible hotels and let's take a look aboard the largest museum carrier in the world if you're driving in there is actually quite extensive car parking as you can see here but this is where you get your first impression of just how large the ship is I mean sure we saw from the other angle it's a pretty big ship but when you're alongside it and you see how small everybody's cars are next to it and the fact that I'm on near enough makes a difference the far side of the car park and I use the panoramic function as you can see here with my phone to get the entire ship in you begin to understand that this is uh a little bit bigger than your average Museum carrier if there is such a thing as an average Museum character although I suppose the existence of so many Essex is technically makes them the average and this impression is aided by one of the things that I point out in a few other museumship videos which is the presentation of the ship relative to the viewer when you get your first look at them and in this case you're very close to the water line which means a huge portion of the ship is above you and of course being an aircraft carrier that's even taller still compared to a battleship where the deck has to be a little bit lower down for stability reasons the two starboard side aircraft lifts are actually still in use if you're lucky and you arrive at the right time you'll see they actually still use them to keep the carrier supplied with food with spare parts machinery and occasionally I guess maybe an aircraft although I've not personally seen them do that but the those planes had to get on there somehow and you'll want to head to around about the level of the island which is where ticketing Admissions and your Gantry to get on board are actually based and for those of you who don't particularly fancy climbing stairs you're in luck because both the entryway and then from the hangar to the flight deck are all accessible via lifts so wheelchair users and so forth are also capable of visiting the carrier so let's take our first steps aboard the carrier has a small Air Wing still so one of the first things you'll notice as you enter is just on your right although I've walked to the other side of the hangar so now I'm looking essentially back at the entrance is a display of World War II era aircraft now interestingly of course these are aircraft that Midway herself never operated but these are the aircraft of the Battle of Midway which is of course what the carrier is named for so right at the well the back relative to when you come in on the but realistically the starboard side at the after section of the hangar you have this rather wonderful F4F wildcat much closer to the entrance on the port side and you can see there just to the right there's also a photo booth where you can have your photos taken as you come in is an SBC dauntless so that's the dive bomber and of course also don't forget in 1942 it's also a scout bomber the main difference between the Scout and die bombers being that the Scout bomber would go out with a 500 pound bomb which would allow it to fly further and a little bit quicker whereas the full strike bomber dauntless would go out with a thousand pound bomb so flew a bit slower couldn't fly quite as far but could hit a lot harder there's a few minor variations otherwise but generally speaking if you put a thousand pound bomb on a scouting dauntless or a 500 pound bomb on a strike Squadron dauntless you weren't really going to be able to tell much difference apart from the tail markings and know before anyone asks they haven't done that expedition down to the wreck of Lexington and fished up a uh Devastator torpedo bomber this is in fact a replica and in my opinion one of the few decent things to come out of the recent Midway movie they actually made a full-scale mock-up of a Devastator for filming purposes and then they donated it to USS Midway so this is about the closest thing you're going to get to seeing a real Devastator and lesson until someone goes down to Lexington with a grab claw but in the interim it's quite an interesting thing to look at most especially because when you see the large majority of torpedo bombers of the second world war of course they carry their Torpedoes parallel to the fuselage whereas as you can see here the Devastator carries its torpedo pointing at an angle downwards so those are your three primary aircraft of the Battle of Midway and what you can also see in this photo underneath the Devastator is that there is also a approximate 15 minute audio visual presentation in a little Cinema just at the back there which is all about the Battle of Midway so that's also definitely worth a look but for obvious reasons I can't exactly show you footage or photos of what's going on inside because apart from anything that'd be very rude now as you progress through the hangar deck there's a number of other things there's obviously the gift shop there's a number of simulators that you can go on that will take you through a virtual tour of how it feels ostensibly at least to fly in a number of different aircraft operated from Midway at different times and there is also a gallery of slightly later World War II aircraft there's a Corsair and Avenger and so on and so forth somehow despite having that bid on between three separate times I neglected to actually take any photos of them I think I was just looking at the aircraft there is however this little thing you can see in the top left and yes that is Assassin I think um or maybe it's a piper cup I don't know anyway some kind of civilian-ish type High Wing aircraft that you won't normally find on an aircraft carrier but of course Midway although being conceived towards the end of the second world war served throughout pretty much the entirety of the Cold War and that particular aircraft I believe is a souvenir from her days off of Vietnam when a particularly enterprising South Vietnamese pilot and his family decided they were going to get out of South Vietnam as quickly as humanly possible and they went in that thing and it landed on the carrier and one other thing just before we head along the hangar and out the port forward side up onto the flight deck and thus into the island you will notice well this is another view of the Devastator but when you first enter the Midway just behind the F4F which is so I'm looking at just the very left of this photo you can just about see a little bit of the sign behind the tail of the FR sticking out there there is an absolutely superb second hand Bookshop run by the staff it's a little bit difficult to find but if you like Naval history books it's definitely somewhere to go they of course have copies of shattered sword because it's USS Midway of course they're going to but there's a huge variety of other books both log books and debt Cruise logs from various U.S Navy ships there's a little bit of land and air stuff as well but the vast majority of it is a bewildering and massive variety of Naval history books which you can have for pretty reasonable prices there's some pretty nice posters there as well absolutely recommend that you go and visit it although perhaps it might be an idea to visit it on your way out otherwise you're going to be tracking quite a few books up and down this carrier and as we mentioned before she's pretty big as you head up the outside stairs you'll see a number of these little gray pods you might be wondering what on Earth are these well they're not an early prototype form of tic tac a little bit too big for that but they also have a couple of open ones and a little guide that tells you what they are they are in fact very well appointed little life raft sets gone are the days of the Carly float and break into the ice cream supply for all your worth before you're unceremoniously dumped into the Pacific in the top half as you can see there's a pair of oars and something that looks like a slightly melted oversized fruit Winder that is in fact the life raft but in the other half of the case hey there's a bunch of suppliers and they're all neatly labeled so what you actually get in this little thing is firstly a 25-man auto inflating Life Draft so don't worry you don't have to inflate it all yourself it also has a c anchor to keep it nice and stable which is quite useful because otherwise you will be pitched over in rough Seas eventually now as it notes at the top of the diagram there you can see kind of top right there is an inflation cylinder well two and that's what will allow you to allow the raft to both inflate and hopefully stay inflated even as a little boarding ramp on the right hand side so if you need to pick more people up in the water or indeed if you yourself are in the water one of these things is floated by you have a way of getting on board because of course a 25-man raft is going to be a relatively substantial bit of Kit once it's fully inflated and there's some rescue lines but we saw the oars there's a bucket just in case you need to bail it out because water will eventually get in despite the Little Shelter canopy that they've got as well then you've also got signal mirrors because you need to signal to opposing vessels well yeah any vessel really presumably it's an opposing vessel if you've been sunk but it might be a friendly vessel anyway the signal mirror will help in daylight at least to tell people that you're there and if it's nighttime there's a flashlight or as we would call it in the UK a torch a whistle like you get on an airliner for all the questionable good that's gonna do to be honest I think the whistle is probably better for finding your way to the raft I.E you blow it and people in the water well let's see ah there is a raft over there I shall try and get on board you've also got blankets fresh water um a fishing kit first aid kit some motion sickness tablets a marker which is a basically a bunch of very very strong dye again very useful for being spotted from the air there is a utility knife um so I guess one person has to be in charge of the knife and you also get 25 food packages to go with your water so it's fully stocked and provisioned to keep 25 men alive for a bit of time and if you are less than 25 men well hey you get some extra rations to go around on the tool that I did you pretty much head straight for the island so this is looking off the stern of the island heading up into the rarified atmosphere of the command areas you can see there is a rather nicely painted A6 Intruder there quite happily waiting and over on the port side they have a variety of helicopters which as far as I can tell includes at least 50 if not more of all various types of helicopters I've actually ever served on US Navy aircraft carriers right back from the very very earliest ones over there on the left and slightly off screen through to that wonderful rather white seeking and then heading over to an sh-60 further on the right they don't have every single one but near enough there's also a nice big radar Mast and yes that radar does Spin and was spinning at the time this photo was taken and speaking of radar another later refit addition to the ship launchers to deceive incoming radar specifically incoming radar from missiles and possibly also from aircraft but don't worry that's not the extent of midway's electronics fit out you will see quite a few Radars later on that are somewhat further forward on the ship and there's a little view through the fence or railing that's available to stop you from plunging horror fiddly to your death shows you just how high up you've come so quickly yes those little cars right down where we were parked earlier in this video and here although the giant smarty of this mini a-wax parked down below is a fairly obvious feature of this photo just to the right and slightly above the giant smarty Dome you'll notice this tiny little Mount pedestal mounted thing that looks like a very small telescope that's actually quite important because it helps the crew to take bearings to various points so that they can work out where they are whilst they're navigating obviously because this ship was navigating mostly during the era before GPS and so when they're moving through enclosed waterways like San Diego it's very important for them to know exactly where they are otherwise they are going to join the when to ground in our own Home Port club which they don't really want to do and there's a bit more that you'll see further in the island that explains a bit more about that now in those last two photos you may have seen some glass panels and some angled Windows just behind well initially the little Rangefinder and then me and this is where we find ourselves now all this lovely green paint on the interior no this is not the bridge the area where the ship is commanded from this is where everybody watches proceedings on the flight deck this being one of the later additions to Midway during one of her many refits and it essentially sponsors out from the port side of the island and actually overhangs part of the flight deck which gives you a pretty good view now of course we are sitting behind at the two seats so you only get some of that view but you can look left and this gives you a good view of the ship's Stern and therefore also where aircraft are going to be landing although you might also get a view of some of the preparations for flights being prepared to take off and then you can look to your right which looks up past the rest of the island and of course from here you can see most of what's involved with aircraft being launched instead now before we go any further I'm just going to show you this shot which is of the AFT part of the flight deck and somehow uh all of the photos I took on the off part of the flight deck pretty much with the exception of two or three seem to have come out extremely heavily flooded with a light so it's kind of like ghost images of the various planes which is really unfortunate because I didn't realize that until I was checking the files despite and this being you know early 2023 after I'd been back to Midway twice in 2023 when I could have renewed them if I bothered to check those pictures so unfortunately you won't get any close-ups of the rather wonderful array of aircraft they have stationed on the back there although I would say they do have an ra5 vigilante which is one of my favorite Cold War era aircraft they've also got A1 Skyraider and a whole host of early Cold War era aircraft including the good old Ensign Eliminator the Cutlass but the main reason I'm showing you this photo other than by way of apology for missing out all those wonderful aircraft but let's face it you've probably seen a fair number of them on the Yorktown video as well and yes that is an F14 over there on the right there's a whole story as to why that's on Midway but getting back again to the main point just behind the F4 Phantom which is almost dead center there you'll see this rather odd complicated little tent structure now there are two of these there's this one here which is in the middle of the landing area and there's another one a bit further forward adjacent to one of the forward catapults and in these areas you can learn an awful lot about how you land aboard an aircraft carrier or be it admittedly a Cold War era one and also obviously how you take off from one now they have regularly scheduled talks there by docents volunteers aboard the ship and what's quite remarkable about them uh for at least for me is that these aren't quite quite just staff all of the times that I was there and sat down and listened to one of them it was actually being given by men who had flown from and obviously landed on the carrier so they'd not they were not only telling you this is how you do it they'd have done it for real and they've got a variety of pictures and photos and videos that they show to help liven up the demonstration but it is quite fascinating to listen to someone who's actually done this job on quite often on this particular ship when she was in service now telling you this is exactly how it's done and they can point out the various bits of landing and takeoff equipment that are scattered around the ship and if you ask them nicely once they've finished the preset presentation they will quite often tell you little details about their own service aboard which obviously you're not going to find anywhere else I was very lucky at one point on that particular little tent shelter they're able to speak to a gentleman who piloted a number of aircraft on and off of Midway but one of the more interesting ones for me that I wanted to learn more about was he'd actually used a Skyraider on Midway and as I said they do have a sky radar further back on the stern of the ship which is a fascinating little aircraft although little is probably the last thing you'll be thinking when you see the thing now you'll remember that little scope that we saw on our way up through the island this is why that thing is so important so this is obviously a course chart for Midway protected by perspex that wouldn't actually be the case while it was in service but if you don't people will take the instruments and probably take bits of the chart so now it's protected anyway you can see on this little course track that they've plotted every so often there are points with multiple diagonal lines running across the ship's course now for those of you who've served in the Navy or indeed have navigated a ship of any particularly great size you'll know exactly what they are so apologies for stating the blinding of the office to you but for everybody else these are points where they've checked their position against landmarks so they would have used a scope like the one we saw earlier and then you will train it on a known Landmark whose position is already on a good quality map and then once you're happy that you are aligned with it you will check what the bearing is on the scope this is why it's important to use a scope that's mounted on something because then it will obviously have a stabilized base along with indicators telling you what your bearing is so then you would say okay there is a lighthouse let's say bearing 240 degrees and then you'd look for another landmark or you'd already know what another landmark and so maybe there's a wharf or a jetty and you'd swing over to that and say well okay that is at 300 degrees and you have to do this pretty quickly because of course the ship is underway and then someone can draw a line with a reciprocal bearing from the lighthouse and a reciprocal bearing from the waffle key and where those lines cross over that is where you are and that is very useful to know especially in a narrow channel environment now of course that doesn't really work at out in the open sea when there's no particularly distinctive landmarks but then apart from the occasional Rock most of which hopefully would think have been charted there's usually not too much you need to worry about out in the open sea um so this is much more important when you're either close to Shore or you're coming in through a channel this is all of course taking place about Midway along the island it's not actually taking place on the bridge if you like this is on the bridge a bit further forward admittedly not too far forward but there is a phone so that you can call your results through to the bridge rather than having to yell forward because whilst it may not be a huge physical distance oh let's just say if the ship is closed up for action and there's jet aircraft roaring off left right and Center all the ships pitching and rolling in Heavy Seas yelling forward that's not really gonna cut it as far as transmitting information is concerned now you'll notice a little board over on the left that's because the Midway is kept at least as far as anything to do with sort of freezing in the moment of time of action is kept in a period that's basically contemporaneous with her operations off of the Iraqi Coast in the first Gulf War back at the start of the 90s and so this board reflects part of that but as you can see from the rest of it there's this wonderfully eccentric mix of stuff that you'd recognize from a ship that had not seen service since the second world war through the Cold War and all the way up to well the end of the Cold War the 90s and everything in between and yes having that compass on the bridge is again very very important because although she is a by the end of her career a heavily refitted aircraft carrier operating very modern attack aircraft of the jet era fa-18s and so forth she is still for the majority of her career as I said before operating in a pre-gps environment so whilst having compass on the bridge is still useful these days having a compass on the bridge pre-gps days is even more vital now you'll notice there's a little yellow thing over there to the left and this is a series of alarms the the captain or a relevant Bridge officer can hit if necessary and they're all usefully labeled so the little green one down there on the bottom left tucked out the way that's a chemical alarm then you've got the yellow one on the top right which is the Collision alarm which you generally hope you're probably well you hope you don't have any of them but if you're gonna have to hit any of them the Collision alarm means something on your end has probably gone horribly wrong whereas the other two probably more like someone else's fault you know someone might be at fault for the collision and it may not be you but let's face it when you've got as many sensors as you have on the Midway if you're about to get involved in a collision there's probably at least a minor bit of culpability on your part so you probably didn't never want to have to hit that and then of course you've got the general something's gone wrong everybody be prepared for something to go even worse alarm which is nicely in red on the port side of the bridge is one of only two seats that you can see this one as you can tell from the label on the back is co commanding officer this is for the captain and the other one on the far right on the other side of the bridge is for a senior marine officer and of course is labeled gator but in a rather interesting setup is you can see there's the CO's chair just outside there is this internal Bridge as well now at the time I forgot to ask whether this is actually the original bridge and they've expanded during one of the refits around it and hence you have this double layer or whether this was supposed to be some sort of slightly ineffective conning Tower Arrangement because there's kind of a bridge wrapped around a bridge is what you will see on say an Iowa class Battleship wrapped around the codding tower but well you can probably tell that this thickness of Steel is not a thickness of Steel that is going to act in any way shape or form as any kind of armor but nonetheless it is a interesting little feature with everything painted in blue and over to the left unfortunately the good old days of that big bra style you might have seen on Olympia and so forth where you can ratchet it back and forth and be big clangs telling you that the engine room has received your orders for high or low speed or whatever change in speed you've ordered well they're all gone instead you've got this kind of copper possibly bronze fronted device which as you can see it has little dials instead so you can still tell the engine rooms what you want to do in terms of going forwards or backwards and how fast but their response and everything is going to be just that little bit more muted although you'd also have an RPM counter built in at the bottom which is quite handy and slightly further back from that we have a steering position again Midway being a slightly newer ship we've gone away from the nice big wooden Wheels with brass inlays to uh what appears to be just a nice brass wheel it's not as big as the old ones but then it doesn't really need to be because well the days of mechanically steering the ship as in you turn the wheel and it directly turns the ships rather those are long gone so there's all electromechanical interfaces at which point you don't need the massive lever arms that you do on that that form a age of sail ships wheel so you can get away with something a bit smaller and a bit more practical and spinning around you get this look behind and this is useful if for no other reason then you get a rather wonderful view of this intricate set of levers which allow you to open and close this particular door or hatch depending on what you want to call it with a single wheel turn now you'll be aware from other ships particularly the World War II museum ships the museum battleships that in the older days if you wanted to fully seal a door you'd have to dog that with multiple separate levers or dogs that you that have to individually shut and sometimes working out which one of those is still sharp when you're trying to open one can be a bit interesting but on this slightly newer ship you have this system which as you can see allows you to put multiple locks points in with a single turn there are some examples of the older version as well but it's a rather interesting from an engineer's perspective we're then going to descend out of the island for a little bit and just take a quick look at the ship's kill markers there plus all its various Awards all stenciled up on the side and of course this rather wonderful fetching notice in yellow because again unlike the older carriers you now have to be aware of jet aircraft the jet blast of them may blow you over the side uh that may also eat you but that's only if you get ridiculously close you also have the props because you have things like the a-wax aircraft and the carrier on board delivery or Cod aircraft they're running on turboprops so you could walk into those and well um I believe there's a scene in Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark that tells you exactly what happens if you do that and then you've got rotors because of course it's also operating helicopters and they'll do pretty much the same thing to you except horizontally now as we move further up the flight deck this is just past the second hand I told you where you can learn all about the aircraft taking off and they have out for demonstration one of the elements fairly significant element of the steam catapult that helps launch the aircraft so this is the slug if you like that sits inside the channel of the steam catapult and the spit at the top will then obviously protrude out out the top which is then part of the assembly that the aircraft ultimately can be hooked to and then when they release the steam pressure this goes forward which drags the aircraft with it and hopefully if it all goes well the aircraft goes wee and disappears off into the ether up front and as you can see it's sitting just in front of what I believe is an f8 Crusader it doesn't look like an A7 to me and there's that little tent that I talked about just hiding that off to the right and then as we continue our journey which obviously on a natural aircraft would have taken you a matter of seconds we come across these These are high frequency radio antenna and much as USS Ranger cv4 back in the interval period had funnels that could point up or Point horizontally depending on whether she was conducting fly tops or not on most carriers of the 1930s 40s and onwards at least for a good chunk of time you'll see these high frequency antennas they can come in pairs like this they can come singally they can be very long they can be a bit shorter but in any case if the aircraft carrier is in motion and is not expecting to conduct flight Ops they will be rotated so they Point vertically and if they are positioned horizontally like they are in this case then that indicates that the aircraft carrier is expecting to conduct flight operations or indeed potentially is conducting flight operations so if you ever see a photograph of a carrier with these long antennas sticking out you can tell roughly what it's doing or what it thinks it's about to do based on their position and then we arrive at the very front of the ship this section again is an addition it didn't exist when the ship was originally launched and these two little prongs here well they're not for people to go jumping off into the sea from and they're not viewing platforms for the aircraft to be watched as they're launched as someone while I was there suggested they are in fact a part of a system that encloses stops for those big slugs that you saw that would be launching the aircraft forwards and then looking back you can see the direct line of this is the Portside Ford steam Catapult running all the way back to that f8 what looks like a very very long way away there are also ceremonies of various kinds semi-regularly held aboard Midway I can't remember exactly what this particular set of chairs was set up for when I came back in 2023 they weren't there obviously I they I think they do re-enlistment and promotion ceremonies amongst other things I possibly of weddings I guess you might be able to get married aboard an aircraft carrier um but in any case I don't remember exactly what this one was for other than they seem to have been anticipating quite a few guests and that in turn leads us back to the main part of flight deck and this is a rather nice view of the island where you can see just how many different kinds of antenna for various types of radio communication as well as many different Radars are actually stuck on the island as it exists today and just over to the port side this rather unassuming collection of light bulbs is in fact a vital part of the ship's Landing system so how this works is as the pilot approaches you can see you've got this array of sort of blue green and red bulbs over on the left and the right so that will give you an idea of where you are aligned horizontally but hopefully between that the lights on the carrier and if it's daylight the markings on the carrier getting your horizontal alignment won't necessarily be quite as difficult as your vertical alignment and for your vertical alignment that's what this array of well four yellows and a red are for and each of these bulbs is arranged in such a way that its light is only visible on a very specific angle of approach and as you are coming in on your approach of course you're constantly having to adjust your angle of approach because the carry is moving away from you it's not a fixed Runway what you're trying to do is get the center light visible which will be known to you as the center light because it will align perfectly with these two horizontal rows of sort of greeny blue lights on either side and that means that the light obviously the light is shining on its fixed angle upwards and if you can see it that means you are on that angle of approach which is the angle of approach you actually want to be on because if you come in too low then at best you're going to slam down quite short and possibly violently at worst you're going to plow straight into the stern of the ship which is not good and if you're too high well again best case scenario you miss completely you have to power up and go again worst case scenario you actually do manage to hit the deck but you hit the deck too far forward away from the wires and then you well tip over the front and drown probably a couple of the aircraft photos that I took that didn't get horrifically whitened out by the sun they of course have a uh-1 because of course they do everybody has a uh-1 uh ones are fun although I must admit it is a little bit odd just from a relatively amateur aircraft Enthusiast perspective when I do see uh ones because I'm much more used to Modern helicopters with multiple rotor blades and then you have here is the uh1 which is recognizably more on the modern side of things than some of the sort of reinforced lattice girder and the glass bubble monstrosities that make up the early forms of helicopters but it just has this wonderful thick almost plank like two-bladed rotor and speaking of multiple blades and rotors this is basically what my childhood idea of what a helicopter looked like looked like um the sea king or whatever the US Navy designation for it is so these things were quite common sites in the skies of the Southern UK either goes Coast Guard helicopters or army or navy helicopters and yeah when I was small and you saw one of these things getting around you thought ah that is what a helicopter looks like and to me that is still What helicopter looks like partly because it is a helicopter and partly because it's also actually once you look at all helicopters it's a fairly distinctive helicopter All Things Considered I do like this one's paint Scheme though and then re-entering the island at a slightly lower level there's this rather wonderful planning device and yes it is a planning device now you can see that what we've got here is the layout of at least part of the ship and a bunch of little Silhouettes cut out that represent various aircraft you can see the F-14 there over on the right which has its wings out in maximum spread position and some of the others have their wings either unfolded or just fixed because they don't have only Wings others clearly do have their wings represented in a folded State and this is to help the officers plan out how they're going to arrange the aircraft and indeed what aircraft they can arrange because this is all exactly to scale so when the ship's actually in service there'd be a lot more of these little cutouts they can use and when they are going to conduct flight operations or transport operations or they're thinking about re-distributing the Air Group they can break out all of these little indicators and go okay well if we arrange everything like this it will work but if we arrange everything like this it won't work but if we put it like this it looks like it'll work but we can't actually maneuver some of these things around so that's not going to have to do something different and it has the advantage of you can play around this with this thing for a few hours get something vaguely workable and you then you don't have to put up with accidentally locking in or damaging several tens of millions of dollars worth of expensive aircraft whilst you try and play a giant game of Tetris with them and this is something that as far as I'm aware they still have on Modern carriers because it's a lot faster and more intuitive than doing it digitally although I believe digital versions also do exist now deeper down in the ship there's the planning areas now obviously these are again set in Cold War one period so lots of maps of Iraq and the Persian Gulf and as you can see here there's myself and the other wonderful docent who showed me around and we're going over the attack plans I think to see if we there's anything else that we could come up with but there probably wasn't there's also a bunch of artifacts down there um some of which have been donated by crew who have bought the ship at the time so you can have a look at those and this is one of the status boards that again for the snapshot that they've decided to display Midway at in the cic tells you exactly who was around so over on the left there you can see a bunch of US Navy vessels including two battleships both of which you can visit as museums these days and then over on the right you can also see an accompanying a number of other Allied warships now if I'm remembering the episode of mingles with Jingles correctly and then cross correlating with the ships that were the Royal Navy ships that are listed as present there on the right I think this means that Midway is simulating a day when no less than the Mighty Jingles himself was present feel free if you happen to be a subscriber to Jingles as well to let me know in the comments if I am correct or who knows maybe even Jingles himself will see this and he'll be able to let us know it is a very atmospheric place down over in COC about the only problem with it is that the uh obviously that means the lighting levels are somewhat low which means getting clear photos from a handheld camera of everything that's going on can be a little bit difficult and no that's not uh sunlight coming in through massive rectangular Windows that's a bunch of projector screens showing things running but nonetheless whilst again this is relatively modern equipment on the grand scale of from when the ship was launched to now it is interesting how although we've got this circular PPI screen which was just being introduced towards the mid to latter part of the second world war not a huge amount has changed about the screen itself in its basic appearance this is a little bit more resolution maybe a few more details appended uh but the main thing that will have changed compared to if you've seen a PPI screened radar unit on some of the older Museum ships or perhaps over in the UK and Belfast is all the ancillary Electronics around it allowing you to interpret and assign things on that screen that is not capability they would have had back in the 1940s and here's some of those screens that I was showing you so not only do they have it set up as a kind of a static snapshot of the day of the Cold War but some of these TV and projector screens are actually running through Loops of news footage or radar tracks Etc showing various Air Raids and so forth in progress which is quite interesting although it is slightly weird to me I mean obviously there are guys who are actually on the ship you know in combat um fighting the ship but it is slightly strange to me of something I remember happening on the news as a kid being represented in a museum as history that makes you feel a little bit old doesn't it then again I was having multiple conversations on this trip with people who had even been born when 9 11 happened so um yeah and then passing out of cic and further along the ship we'd come past one of these smaller galleys I think this is either the captains or one of the officers galleys again which is a little bit interesting in that what's down there on the bottom left I'm fairly sure is a dishwasher and what's up there on the top right is definitely a microwave but again I I don't remember my microwaves having a wood veneer on them but you know each to their own it's a it's a fairly interesting snapshot and some of the canteens Elsewhere on the ship uh set a few years or decades further back in time as well so you get a whole range although with that said a number of people who've been in the Navy who've looked at these have told me aside from the odd microwave and so forth especially once you get to the canteen areas not a huge amount has actually changed even on Modern Navy ships compared to those of the second World War coming back up the stairs into the hangar deck so that you can head down into the engineering spaces you can see this area so yes that's an engine and yes that's many many decks down there's a lift in the hanger deck that allows you to take big bulky items like a jet engine down for maintenance deeper in the ship and they've got that lift in the lower most position you can see all the hatches have been raised and they put a nice big sheet of perspex over the top so those of you who have vertigo can walk out across it not realize look down and go ah before jumping maniacally towards the side and the rest of you can just enjoy it and point at people like me and laugh but up at this level you can also go forward to see where the ship's anchors and chains are stored in this rather nice open-ish space you'll also be able to get a chance to see some of the steam accumulators with the catapults on your way to or from but this is quite interesting because again there's a bit of perspex here on the left and on the right you can look through there down through straight down into the sea but this gives you some idea of what a somewhat more motorized and more modern anchor chain storage area looks like although to be perfectly Fair it's not a Million Miles Away removed from the anchor chain areas that you'll find in even relatively modern ships and I've been on a couple so I can vouch for that at least now there is a lot more to see on Midway there's the engine rooms there's more of cic than just the brief snapshot I showed you there's the Machine Shop uh there's crew quarters messes Etc all sorts of things but that will take the video well over an hour so I think this is probably a decent time to wrap it up if you want to see the rest of the ship then I'm perfectly happy to show you in a subsequent video just leave a comment here down below and let me know that and just before we go also quick shout out to the San Diego Maritime Museum which is just up the road literally from Midway which has a wide variety of different ships including HMS surprise from the bat movie Master and come and some of these other vessels you can see here there's a replica Spanish Galleon and this rather wonderful ferry in the middle is so large I actually forgot once I was on board that it was a ferry and not a building but the giveaway is when you go below and you suddenly find yourself confronted with vertical triple expansion engines so thanks everyone for watching hope you've enjoyed this partial look at some of the Wonders that can be found aboard USS Midway obviously as I said down there in San Diego and many many thanks to these uh staff and the docents and everybody else support USS Midway who made me feel very very welcome when I showed up um hi to all of those of you who on that rather wonderfully hot day stood around and chatted to me for a couple of hours on the AFT fan tale I can also recommend the restaurant it's pretty darn good and uh yeah it's just all around a really interesting place to visit also if you look out over the bow you can usually see at least one maybe two of Midway successes floating on the other side of the channel so until the next video see you again and goodbye that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 112,328

Keywords: wows, world of warships, USS Midway, WW2, Cold War, Gulf War, supercarrier, USN

Id: mZXgS2Hq0lY

Length: 43min 43sec (2623 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023