On July 29, 1967, USS Forrestal (CV-59) was conducting combat operations at Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin, preparing to launch an Alpha Strike against targets in North Vietnam. The flight deck was crowded with fully fueled and fully armed aircraft. At 10:52 in the morning, a Zuni unguided rocket accidentally fired from an F-4 Phantom — the result of a power surge when the aircraft was switched from external to internal power. The rocket crossed the flight deck and struck the fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk, igniting a fire that would kill 134 sailors, injure 161 more, and burn for thirteen hours before it was controlled. It was the deadliest fire in the United States Navy since World War II, and it changed how the Navy thought about ordnance safety, flight deck firefighting, and the management of risk aboard a warship.
The Ship
USS Forrestal (CV-59) was the first of the postwar supercarriers — commissioned on December 1, 1955, and named for James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense. She was the first American carrier designed from the keel up with an angled flight deck and an enclosed hurricane bow, incorporating the lessons of British carrier design that had transformed flight deck operations after World War II. She displaced more than 78,000 tons fully loaded, carried an air wing of roughly eighty aircraft, and represented the Navy's vision of what a carrier should be in the nuclear age. She was homeported at Norfolk, Virginia, and by 1967 was on her second combat deployment to Vietnam.
The Fire
The Zuni rocket that started the fire was one of the most dangerous weapons on the flight deck — unguided, with a contact fuze, and lethal across a wide area when it detonated. When it struck the Skyhawk's centerline fuel tank, the resulting fire ignited jet fuel that spread rapidly across a deck crowded with armed aircraft. The bombs were old Mk 83s pulled from storage — “fat bombs” that the Navy had issued because of shortages of the preferred Mk 82 — and they were not designed to withstand the heat of a sustained fuel fire. Within about a minute and a half, the bombs began cooking off.
The men fighting the fire were working on a burning deck with bombs detonating around them. Flight deck crews, damage control teams, and sailors who had no firefighting training at all ran toward the fire with extinguishers and hoses. Many of them were killed doing it. The fire burned through the flight deck and into the hangar bay. It destroyed and damaged dozens of aircraft. It took the combined efforts of Forrestal's crew and sailors from escort ships — who came aboard to help — to bring it under control. The ship survived, but just barely.
The Reforms That Followed
The Forrestal fire produced a comprehensive examination of naval aviation safety that changed the service permanently. Ordnance handling procedures were redesigned. The fuzing of bombs was changed so that fuzes were not installed until aircraft were on the catapult. Flight deck firefighting training was expanded and formalized — the Navy established a dedicated firefighting training program that has trained generations of flight deck crews. The design of flight deck fire suppression systems was revised. And the management of aircraft ordnance loads on crowded decks was subjected to new controls designed to prevent the kind of cascading catastrophe that the Zuni rocket had triggered.
The lessons of July 29, 1967, were paid for at terrible cost. The 134 sailors who died on Forrestal's flight deck that morning died doing their jobs in conditions that the Navy had not yet fully learned to manage. The reforms that came after them are the reason the Navy manages those conditions better today.
If you served aboard USS Forrestal or want to honor someone who did, The Ship's Store carries collections for the ships of the Navy — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.
Legacy
USS Forrestal continued to serve for decades after the 1967 fire, completing her Vietnam deployment, conducting subsequent deployments to the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and serving as a training carrier in her final years before decommissioning in 1993. The fire is the defining event of her career — not because it diminished her, but because the way the Navy responded to it, in the months and years that followed, made every carrier that came after her safer. The 134 men who died on her flight deck did not die for nothing. The Navy learned what it had to learn, and it learned it because of them.