USS Kitty Hawk CV-63 Biplane Aircraft Carrier Patch

The biplane over the sand dune is the whole reason for the name: Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, is where the Wright brothers made the first powered airplane flight in December 1903. USS Kitty Hawk was the second Navy ship to carry that name, and she was the lead ship of her class of big-deck carriers. New York Shipbuilding in Camden, New Jersey, launched her in May 1960. She was commissioned at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on 29 April 1961 with Captain William F. Bringle in command. Her crews called her the Battle Cat, and she stayed in commission for 48 years.

She went to Vietnam beginning in late 1965, made repeated combat cruises through the rest of the decade, and was back in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1972. On 29 April 1973, after conversion to a multi-mission carrier, she was redesignated from CVA-63 to CV-63, the first Pacific Fleet carrier to carry the CV designation. Over the years she embarked several air wings, among them Carrier Air Wing 11 and Carrier Air Wing 15. In August 1998 she became the forward deployed carrier at Yokosuka, Japan, with Carrier Air Wing 5 flying from Naval Air Facility Atsugi. In October 2001 she sailed to the North Arabian Sea as an afloat forward staging base for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and in 2003 she supported Operation Southern Watch and Operation Iraqi Freedom from the North Persian Gulf before returning to Yokosuka on 6 May.

The patch is a 3.75 inch circle with a gold merrowed edge. A gold biplane flies across a white cumulus cloud on a light blue sky, above a tan dune and a dark blue band of horizon, which puts the 1903 flight and the Outer Banks sand right on the patch. A navy blue scroll sweeps across the lower half with USS KITTY HAWK-CV63 stitched in gold block letters. The CV63 lettering matches the designation she carried from 1973 on, the years most of her sailors remember. It has an iron-on backing and takes a needle if you would rather sew it on.

Kitty Hawk spent close to ten years as the carrier based in Japan, the ship that was always closest to the Western Pacific when something happened. Her decommissioning ceremony was held on 31 January 2009, and she left service on 12 May 2009 as the last conventionally powered carrier in the active fleet. She was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register in 2017 and towed to Brownsville, Texas, in 2022 for dismantling. For the thousands of sailors who stood watches on her flight deck and in her hangar bays, this patch carries the name of the ship they knew.

It sits well in a shadow box next to a Kitty Hawk cruise book, a set of ribbons and a WestPac liberty photo. It also belongs on the vest that goes to ship reunions, or with a shipmate who rode her out of Yokosuka. At 3.75 inches it reads clearly at arm's length.