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USS America Fueling-at-Sea Caught on Film, And It’s Stunning

For most of us average Joes, the trials and tribulations of military sailors mean nothing. We know these guys are out there, maybe we have some romantic view of how life on a military ship is, or maybe we don’t even give the subject a second thought. But one thing is certain: sailors experience things we will never get to know.
USS America sailing next to USNS Rappahannock 11 photos
Photo: U.S. Navy
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A snippet of that can be experienced in the video below, released by the U.S. Navy earlier this week, and showing an operation at sea which took place at the beginning of the month. In a nutshell, we get to see USS America (LHA 6) being refueled while on the go by fleet replenishment oiler USNS Rappahannock (T-AO 204).

The USS America is an amphibious assault ship of the America-class, which was commissioned back in 2014. It comes with a displacement of almost 45,700 tons, can carry up to 1,687 Marines, and it’s armed to the teeth with missile launchers, CIWS, and machine guns. To top them all off, the ship can carry a wide variety of helicopters.

Presently, the ship is operating in U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations, which would be the Pacific, as the lead ship of the America Amphibious Ready Group.

The USNS Rappahannock on the other hand is a Henry J. Kaiser-class supply ship. It entered service back in 1995 with a displacement of over 43,000 metric tons, and is crewed by around 200 people. The ship can carry 159,000 barrels fuel (including for jets), and it feeds all that to the ships in need through one of five refueling stations.

USS America sailing next to USNS Rappahannock
Photo: U.S. Navy
We get to see a bit how that is done thanks to the video the Navy released. It shows the two ships as they linked-up on August 3 somewhere in the East China Sea, and we get to experience the pretty much all the steps of a refueling-at-sea-operation. We get to see the two vessels approach one another as they’re heading in the same direction, the lines being shot to connect them, the fuel lines being extended across the open sea, and even pallets of goods being sent across.

As for fueling a ship at sea, the first time this crossed someone’s mind was back at the beginning of last century, with the fuel being transported then being coal.

Today, this kind of operation happens all the time. Back in September of last year, for instance, sailors on the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) announced their ship, which can also double as a supply vessel, had transferred 1 million gallons (4.55 million liters) of fuel to other Navy vessels in just nine months.

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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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