USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72): the US Navy's fifth Nimitz-class carrier

USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is the fifth of the Navy’s Nimitz-class carriers, commissioned on 11 November 1989¹, and named after President Abraham Lincoln. She is home-ported at Naval Air Station North Island, San Diego, California, where she serves as flagship of Carrier Strike Group 3 with Carrier Air Wing Nine embarked.

Design and construction

Newport News Shipbuilding, now part of Huntington Ingalls Industries, has built US Navy aircraft carriers since USS Ranger (CV-4) in the 1930s² and built Abraham Lincoln under a contract awarded on 27 December 1982. Her keel was laid and she was later launched and christened, with JoAnn K. Webb as sponsor, 3 November 1984 to 13 February 1988, costing $2.24 billion¹.

Newport News later refueled and overhauled Abraham Lincoln as one of six Nimitz-class carriers put through that program², alongside Nimitz, Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt and George Washington. Huntington Ingalls Industries redelivered the carrier to the Navy on 12 May 2017, after over 48 months of work that at peak drew as many as 4,000 shipbuilders onto the ship. The overhaul defueled and refueled her two nuclear reactors and repaired or upgraded the propulsion plant, hull, shafting, piping and combat and aviation support systems³.

Specifications

Abraham Lincoln displaces 104,300 long tons and measures 332.8 m overall along the flight deck⁴; naval-technology.com gives a class-wide hull length of 317 m with a 333 m flight deck and a displacement of 102,000 t. Her beam is 40.8 m, or 76.8 m overall. Two General Electric pressurized-water reactors, A4W units, drive four steam turbines and four shafts for 260,000 shaft horsepower, and the class reaches over 30 knots. The class launches aircraft from four steam-driven catapults, one every 20 seconds. Her complement runs to about 3,200 ship’s company plus 2,480 air wing¹; naval-technology.com gives a class-wide figure of more than 6,000 personnel, with room for 3,184 crew and 2,800 aircrew⁵.

For self-defense she carries two Mk 57 launchers for the Sea Sparrow missile, plus RAM and Phalanx close-in weapon systems, the Phalanx firing up to 3,000 rounds per minute⁵; she can carry 90 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters¹.

Service history

After trials she left Norfolk in September 1990 and sailed around South America to Alameda, California. Her May 1991 deployment was diverted to Operation Fiery Vigil after Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, and she led a 23-ship armada that moved nearly 45,000 people⁶ from Subic Bay Naval Station to Cebu. She was the first Pacific Fleet carrier to integrate female aviators into her crew after the combat exclusion laws were lifted on 28 April 1993¹.

She deployed in July 2002 in support of Operations Enduring Freedom and Southern Watch, and the deployment was extended to support Operations Southern Watch and Iraqi Freedom. Over that deployment her air wing flew some 16,500 sorties and used 1.6 million pounds of ordnance. It ended in May 2003 with a visit by President George W. Bush; a sign displayed during that visit, the “Mission Accomplished” banner, became controversial after guerrilla warfare in Iraq increased. When a tsunami struck Southeast Asia in December 2004⁶, she was diverted to Operation Unified Assistance at the head of Carrier Strike Group 9; in her 33 days on station she and her battle group delivered 5.7 million pounds of relief supplies¹.

Her deployment from 1 April 2019 ended after 295 days at sea, breaking the ship’s own record for the longest post-Cold War deployment by a US carrier. In a later crash off San Diego, an MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter embarked aboard the carrier went down in the Pacific; five crew members were killed and one was rescued. Her strike group was later ordered to the Gulf of Oman as a deterrent against potential Iranian aggression against Israel. After an exercise in the South China Sea on 8 January 2026, she was reported heading to the Middle East and, according to reports, deployed there on 26 January. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on 1 March that four ballistic missiles had struck the carrier; the Pentagon rejected the claim, saying the missiles “weren’t even close” to their target. Further claims followed from the Iranian military on 5 March, of drone strikes, and from Iran on 25 March¹, of Qader cruise missiles; the ship was not harmed in any of the three cases.

Fate

USS Abraham Lincoln remains in active service¹, home-ported at Naval Air Station North Island, San Diego, California.

Sister ships and similar ships

Abraham Lincoln is the fifth of the US Navy’s ten Nimitz-class carriers, all built by Newport News Shipbuilding; the first of the class, USS Nimitz, was commissioned in 1975. The class remained the largest warships ever built until 2017, when USS Gerald R. Ford, the first ship of a new class of carriers⁵, was commissioned.