Aircraft Carrier Midway Heads for Berth as S.D. Museum

SAN DIEGO — Like a military veteran being recalled to service, the retired aircraft carrier Midway is set today to begin the slow voyage from San Francisco Bay to become a museum here.

The trip from the dock at Oakland to the pier at North Island Naval Air Station is scheduled to take five days, weather permitting.

The journey to turn the 1,000-foot-long ship into a nonprofit, privately run museum has taken a decade because of politics, environmental concerns and money problems.

Begun in 1992 by sports equipment magnate Alan Uke, the drive to bring the Midway to San Diego took longer than anyone expected.

Uke’s group had taken as its working model the case of the carrier Lexington. It took officials in Corpus Christi, Texas, about nine months to get that carrier out of retirement and opened as a museum.

Even considering California’s more stringent environmental review process, Midway boosters figured the process would take a few years at most.

“We were naive,” Midway project official David Lloyd Flohr said. “We thought the Midway would be ready for the Republican convention in 1996, but we missed. Then we missed both of the Super Bowls,” which were played in San Diego in 1998 and 2003.

“It was very frustrating, but we were determined not to let the bureaucrats win,” Flohr said.

Barring a last-minute storm -- either political or atmospheric -- the Midway, retired from active duty since 1992, is scheduled to be towed into San Diego Bay on Friday.

After a week’s worth of repair work at North Island, the carrier will be towed across the bay to Navy Pier, its final destination. Volunteers have been in Oakland for weeks, painting and cleaning the ship.

“There’s been a good deal of debris to clear away ... but the ship is in surprisingly good shape,” said Midway official Scott McGaugh.

Though the track records of the nearly 50 ships that have been turned into museums around the country have been varied -- some have been successful, some are struggling -- members of the Midway project are convinced they have a winner.

The Navy Pier site is part of San Diego’s downtown, close to hotels and other tourist attractions. The Navy has pledged cooperation, and the Midway group has support from the San Diego Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park, one of the nation’s top museums.

With the Midway’s arrival imminent, the last remaining opposition group last week decided to give up the fight. “It’s not something we’re concerned about anymore,” said Environmental Health Coalition official Jason Baker.

The Midway idea began with Uke’s failed attempt in 1992 to win the Republican nomination for Congress. He had suggested that bringing a Navy ship to San Diego as a museum could give the region’s sagging tourist economy a boost.

The Midway had just been retired after 47 years of service, including as a platform for launching warplanes in the Korean War, the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm.

Although it was never based in San Diego, it had been brought to North Island for official decommissioning before being towed to the Navy’s mothball fleet in Bremerton, Wash.

To get the Navy to transfer title to the ship, Uke’s group had to raise enough money to keep the project afloat as well as meet all requirements from local and state agencies, including the California Coastal Commission. The agency’s staff was dubious.

To get commission approval, the Midway group bought bay-front land on the southern edge of San Diego Bay to provide nesting areas for birds to compensate for any disruption to nesting near Navy Pier.

And to satisfy concerns that the five-story carrier could block view corridors, the group decided that the portion of the ship that provides the best view of the bay and nearby Coronado would be open to the public without charge.

Finally, in late August, the Navy granted the Midway group a 40-year lease, with provisions that allow the Navy to reclaim the ship in case of national emergency or if the museum project founders.

The tentative goal is for a grand opening in June -- timed for the anniversary of World War II’s Battle of Midway in 1942 -- with an average admission cost of $10.50, roughly the same as for the carrier Intrepid museum in New York Harbor. Among the attractions will be a theater, restored warplanes, exhibits, lectures and sleepover activities for students.

Not everyone is happy about the Midway project.

Members of Activist San Diego and the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice -- two groups opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq -- say the Midway museum is an example of San Diego’s domination by the “military-industrial complex.”

“Aircraft carriers are symbols of the new American empire’s ability to project power around the globe to protect, not the American people, but corporate and political interests,” said Martin Eder, director of Activist San Diego.

Safety regulations prohibit Midway boosters from making the trip from San Francisco.

But many of them will be waiting when the ship rounds Ballast Point into San Diego Bay.

“We keep repeating to ourselves: ‘It’s happening, it’s happening, it’s really happening,’ ” Flohr said.