At 10:52 in the morning on July 29, 1967, a Zuni rocket accidentally discharged from an F-4 Phantom on the flight deck of USS Forrestal (CVA-59). The rocket crossed the deck and struck the external fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk, igniting a fire. Within seconds, the fire reached other loaded aircraft. Within minutes, bombs began to cook off. The fire burned for more than thirteen hours and killed 134 sailors. It was the worst loss of life on a US Navy ship since World War II, and the lessons learned in those hours reshaped the way every carrier in the fleet trains, prepares, and fights fires to this day.
The First Supercarrier
USS Forrestal was the first of her kind — the Navy's first purpose-built "supercarrier," commissioned in 1955 and designed from the keel up for jet aviation. At over 1,000 feet long with an angled flight deck, enclosed hurricane bow, and steam catapults, she represented a fundamental break from the carrier designs of World War II. The Navy named a class of ships after her, and the four Forrestal-class carriers that followed — Saratoga, Ranger, and Independence — shared her basic design. When Forrestal deployed to Vietnam in the summer of 1967, she was already one of the most recognizable hulls in the fleet.
She departed Norfolk in June 1967 for a WESTPAC deployment, joining the carriers already running combat operations from Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin. The air war over North Vietnam in 1967 was at high intensity. The targets had expanded, the political pressures were enormous, and the carriers were the central platform for much of what the Navy was doing in the war. Forrestal's air wing arrived on station ready to fly. Eight days into combat operations, the flight deck caught fire.
The Fire
The 9:00 flight cycle was already loaded and spotted on the deck — aircraft fueled, armed with bombs and rockets, engines running or starting, crews in position. An electrical anomaly in one of the F-4 Phantoms caused a Zuni 5-inch rocket to fire across the deck. It hit the drop tank of an A-4 Skyhawk. The fuel ignited. An aviator climbed out of his cockpit and ran through the fire to get clear — that aviator was then-Lieutenant Commander John McCain, who was nearly killed before sailors pulled him away from the expanding blaze.
What happened next was catastrophic in the way that only fully-loaded flight decks can be catastrophic. The fire reached the bombs. The AN/M65 1,000-pound bombs on the A-4s had a design flaw — their thin steel casings heated up faster than expected, and within approximately 90 seconds of sustained fire, they began to cook off. The first explosion blew holes in the flight deck. Subsequent explosions killed firefighting crews who had closed in to fight the blaze. In the first minutes of the fire, dozens of men died in the explosions before they could react.
The damage control teams that weren't killed in the initial blasts fought the fire for hours. They flooded magazines. They jettisoned burning aircraft over the side. They pushed ordnance into the sea by hand. The men who survived that first wave of explosions worked in conditions that cannot be fully described — heat, smoke, unexploded ordnance still cooking, jet fuel burning across a steel deck, shipmates dead around them. They kept working.
134 Men
When the fire was finally controlled on the morning of July 30, 134 sailors were dead and 161 were wounded. Twenty-one aircraft were destroyed. The damage to the ship was $72 million in 1967 dollars. Forrestal limped to Subic Bay in the Philippines for emergency repairs, then returned to the United States for a long shipyard period. She never returned to Vietnam.
The 134 men who died that day were the pilots who hadn't gotten clear in time, the ordnance crews who had been standing next to their aircraft, the firefighters who ran toward the blaze and were killed by the explosions. They were young men doing the work of a warship in a war, on a morning that started like every other morning on Yankee Station and ended with the worst toll any American ship had taken since the Pacific War.
What Changed
The Forrestal fire resulted in the most comprehensive overhaul of naval aviation safety in the service's history. The investigation identified failures at every level: the design of the Mk-32 fuse on the bombs (changed), the stowage of ordnance on the flight deck during flight ops (changed), the firefighting techniques used by flight deck crews (completely overhauled), the protective equipment worn by flight deck personnel (upgraded), and the training given to damage control teams (fundamentally revised).
The P-17 flight deck firefighting manual that came out of the Forrestal investigation became the standard for carrier aviation worldwide. The "Firefighting School" at the crash fire rescue training facility that sailors attend before joining a carrier crew exists in its current form because of what happened on Forrestal's deck. Every sailor who has ever done a flight deck firefighting evolution is working from a playbook written in the worst possible way.
The Legacy
USS Forrestal returned to service after repairs and continued her career for decades, eventually serving as a training carrier before decommissioning in 1993. She was the last of the Forrestal class to leave active service. The ship survived her worst day by more than twenty-five years.
But July 29, 1967 is the day she is remembered by the men who were there. The sailors who fought that fire, who lost shipmates in those explosions, who kept the ship afloat in the hours that followed — they carry that day in a way that doesn't go away. You were on Forrestal in 1967. That's the whole sentence.
If you served aboard Forrestal or want to honor someone who did, browse the USS Forrestal 1967 cruise collection — gear from the deployment that changed the Navy forever.
You can also explore the full USS Forrestal collection covering all her deployments from commissioning through decommissioning.