US aircraft carrier returns home after record deployment that included Iran war, Maduro capture

By Sean Lyngaas, CNN

(CNN) — The USS Gerald R. Ford, America’s largest and newest aircraft carrier, returned to port in Virginia on Saturday after nearly a year at sea that included participating in the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Iran war, a shipboard fire and repeated plumbing issues.

It goes down in history as the longest operational deployment by a carrier since the end of the Vietnam War, a voyage that has seen the ship serve as a focal point for a string of President Donald Trump’s military objectives overseas.

For families of the sailors, the return is a long-awaited end to what has been a nerve-wracking year when their service members were regularly participating in military operations that dominated the news. They gathered in Norfolk on Saturday to welcome to the carrier home, cheering as it made its way to the dock. Sailors aboard waved to a crowd that held several handmade signs, including one that said, “I missed you! Glad you’re back.”

“What the Ford Carrier Strike Group did, and these destroyers did, was exceptional, phenomenal,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who joined families in welcoming the sailors home.

Victoria Dobson — who, along with her 2-year-old daughter, wore a white dress with American flags on it to welcome her husband home, told CNN’s Brian Todd, “I’m very excited, I’m very relieved.”

“The most difficult part was definitely the single parenting. When he left, she was a baby, and now she’s a big girl,” she said. “All the transitions, like no more high chair … no more baby bottle, I did all that without him and it was hard.”

Adm. Daryl Caudle recognized the difficulties of the longer-than-expected deployment, stressing that he doesn’t “want that to be a precedent.”

Aircraft carriers are designed to deploy for up to seven months, but the Ford was at sea for 11.

While Caudle acknowledged that a “once-in-a-lifetime … confluence of events” led to the long deployment, including US’ war with Iran, he added, “We really want to deploy our ships for the length of time they’re designed to.”

Amini Osias, whose daughter is an aviation electrician who served on the Ford, told CNN before the carrier’s return, “Now I can actually relax and breathe and go back to a normal sleeping pattern.” He said he planned to go out to eat with his daughter, hear her account of the deployment and just be a dad with her.

It was a rough journey at times. A fire broke out in the Ford’s laundry area in March that took the crew roughly 30 hours to put out, clean up and prevent from reigniting. Some 600 sailors lost access to their bunks due to the damage, but none were seriously injured. The damage meant the ship couldn’t do laundry for a stretch, adding to the challenges for the crew.

Caudle said Saturday that the fire is “still under investigation.”

Dakota Klinedinst, a Petty Officer First Class who serves as an aviation structural mechanic on the Ford, told CNN that the extended deployment was “tough” but emphasized how the sailors aboard “worked as a team.”

“The crew did a great job,” Klinedinst said. “I think we all held together, we all held each other up and even, even, like, when things like the fire happened, like, nobody gave up.”

The fire happened months into the ship’s deployment after it had already experienced repeated issues with its toilet system that resulted in intermittent partial outages, a hassle for the crew that required a port visit for repairs.

Even though the Ford is technically advanced and the newest carrier in the fleet, Osias said, families of the sailors “still had those doubts that something can happen.”

Current and former military officials say the $13 billion ship has been indispensable in the US military operations in Iran and Venezuela. For the Venezuela operation the ship launched aircraft that participated in the capture mission, and in Iran the ship served as a platform to send wave after wave of fighter jets into action.

The ship’s electronic catapult system allows it to launch anything from small drones to big aircraft, giving commanders an array of firepower options, Brent Sadler, a 26-year veteran of the Navy and former submarine officer, previously told CNN. The other 10 US aircraft carriers don’t have that capability, according to Sadler.

After pulling away from Virginia last June, the Ford moved across the Atlantic, initially heading to the Mediterranean and up to Norway as part of its scheduled trip before being pulled to the Caribbean for the operation to capture Maduro in January. Then the ship was ordered to rapidly make its way to aid in a potential Middle East conflict, where it contributed to Iran war operations, until it began heading home and passed into the Atlantic from the Mediterranean Sea earlier this month.

This story was updated with additional information.

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CNN’s Brian Todd and Dugald McConnell contributed to this report.