The Ford's 326 Days: Inside the Longest U.S. Carrier Deployment Since Vietnam

The USS Gerald R. Ford pulled alongside Pier 11 at Naval Station Norfolk on Saturday, May 16, 2026, ending a 326-day cruise that no American aircraft carrier has matched since the Vietnam War.

A Cruise Built for Six Months That Ran for Eleven

The Ford left Norfolk on June 24, 2025. American carriers normally deploy for six to eight months. This one stayed at sea for 326 days, almost double the planned tempo, and came home only after passing through three combatant commands and four named seas. By the time the brow came down, roughly 5,000 sailors had been living and working on the carrier itself, with more than 4,500 additional sailors aboard the strike group's escorts, including the destroyers USS Bainbridge and USS Mahan.

The Ford is the lead ship of a new class of nuclear-powered carriers commissioned in 2017 to replace older Nimitz-class designs. It displaces about 100,000 tons, and at roughly $13 billion to build it is the most expensive warship ever constructed. The cruise that just ended was, in effect, its first sustained combat workout, and the Navy chose to run it long. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle previewed the homecoming bluntly: "We're going to give our heroes a welcome back on Saturday, and it's just an extraordinary ship, extraordinary crew, an extraordinary strike group."

Iran, the Mediterranean, and 11,500 Sorties

From the Mediterranean, the Ford fed the U.S. air campaign against Iran, an operation the Navy has called Operation Epic Fury. Carrier Air Wing 8 conducted more than 11,500 flight operations across the deployment, drawn from nine squadrons: Strike Fighter Squadron 31, Strike Fighter Squadron 37, Strike Fighter Squadron 87, Strike Fighter Squadron 213, Electronic Attack Squadron 142, Airborne Command and Control Squadron 124, Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 40, Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 70, and Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 9. The flight deck cycled F/A-18E and F/A-18F Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers, E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes, C-2A Greyhounds, and MH-60R and MH-60S Seahawks and Knighthawks through the catapults and arresting gear.

In early March 2026, the carrier transited the Suez Canal and continued Epic Fury operations from the Red Sea, the third body of water in which the Ford had launched aircraft on this single cruise. The air wing came home ahead of the ship, returning to Naval Station Norfolk on May 11, 2026, after 322 days of its own. Rear Admiral Rich Brophy, Commander of Naval Air Force Atlantic, summed up the air wing's run at the pier: "Throughout their record-breaking deployment, these aviators successfully conducted worldwide operations, embodying the highest ideals of resilience, courage and selfless service."

A Mediterranean Carrier Rerouted to the Caribbean

The Ford's geography is the part of the story that does not fit any normal carrier rotation. In October 2025, the strike group was rerouted from the Mediterranean across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. By January 2026, the carrier was supporting two parallel U.S. military efforts in that theater, Operation Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, which together resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the former president of Venezuela.

Over the course of the deployment, the Ford and its escorts therefore answered to three separate authorities: U.S. European Command, U.S. Central Command, and U.S. Southern Command. They sailed the North Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Caribbean Sea, and the Red Sea on the same cruise. That is not an itinerary written for a single carrier under normal planning assumptions. It is what a fleet with too few decks for too many demands looks like in practice.

The 30-Hour Fire, the 650 Toilets, and the Cost of Staying Out

The duration of the cruise pressed on the ship itself. On March 12, 2026, a non-combat fire broke out in the Ford's main laundry room and burned for roughly 30 hours before it was fully extinguished. Two sailors were directly injured. About 200 more were treated for smoke-related symptoms, and one had to be evacuated for further medical evaluation. Fire and smoke damage forced more than 600 service members out of their berthing, the assigned sleeping quarters that turn 100,000 tons of warship into a place where 5,000 people can live for the better part of a year.

The infrastructure problems did not stop at the fire. Plumbing failures affected nearly 650 of the ship's toilets during the deployment. The Ford has logged 42 plumbing-related maintenance calls since 2023, and 32 of those came in 2025 alone, the year the carrier was supposed to be sailing on schedule. To handle the damage and the repairs, the ship made unscheduled port calls at Souda Bay in Crete on March 23, 2026, and then at Split, Croatia, before returning to sea on April 2, 2026. The Ford never lost the ability to fly missions. It did spend a long deployment fighting its own systems while it fought the campaigns it had been sent to support.

The Record, and What It Means for the Navy

On April 15, 2026, the Ford passed the USS Abraham Lincoln's 295-day cruise from 2020 and became the longest post-Vietnam U.S. carrier deployment on the books. Only two American carrier deployments in the past 60 years have run longer: the USS Midway at 332 days in 1973, and the USS Coral Sea at 329 days in 1965, both during the Vietnam era. Crossing 300 days is rare. Crossing 326 means the modern Navy is being asked to operate at a tempo it has not chosen in half a century.

At Pier 11, with about 5,000 sailors stepping off the gangway under an overcast sky, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth presented the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group with the Presidential Unit Citation for "outstanding performance in action." He told the formation: "It is my honor to present, from the President of the United States, the Presidential Unit Citation to the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group." He then turned to the sailors directly and said, "You didn't just accomplish a mission, you made history. You made a nation proud." Behind him, the steel hull dwarfed the pier and went quiet.

Sources

• Fortune: USS Gerald Ford returns from 11-month deployment
• Navy Times: USS Gerald R. Ford to return Saturday
• Military Times: Air wing returns home after 11 months
• PBS NewsHour: Ford returns after Iran war and Maduro capture
• Straight Arrow News: USS Gerald R. Ford returns home after record deployment