Flight IIA Ships
Oscar Austin is the first ship of the Flight IIA subclass of the Arleigh Burke class. Compared to previous Burkes, Flight IIAs are four feet and six inches (1.4 m) longer, displace about 900 tons more, carry six more VLS cells, and have a hangar that can house two SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. To prevent the additional superstructure aft from fouling radar returns, the rear-facing SPY-1D panels are one deck higher. Oscar Austin is one of two Flight IIA ships using the older 5″/54 caliber naval rifle (the other is Roosevelt (DDG-80)) which cannot use certain advanced munitions that require the longer 5"/62 caliber gun mounted by USS Winston S Churchill and later Burkes.
They have their Harpoon anti-ship missiles removed to reduce costs.
Read more about this topic: USS Oscar Austin (DDG-79)
Famous quotes containing the words flight and/or ships:
“In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I saw three ships come sailing by,
Come sailing by, come sailing by,
I saw three ships come sailing by,
On Christmas Day in the morning.”
—Unknown. As I Sat on a Sunny Bank. . .
Oxford Book of Light Verse, The. W. H. Auden, ed. (1938)