- USS Gerald R. Ford docks in Crete after an onboard fire.
- Fire injured sailors and damaged living areas beyond initial reports.
- The carrier's departure leaves one US aircraft carrier in the conflict zone.
- Repairs expected over a week; return to deployment uncertain.
The USS Gerald R. Ford, the most advanced aircraft carrier in the US Navy and the main force of American airpower in the Iraq War to date, arrived on Monday in the Greek island of Crete at the Naval Support Activity Souda Bay to repair a fire that had gutted its aft laundry room on March 12. The carrier had been at work in the Red Sea in direct support of Operation Epic Fury when the fire broke out, and by its departure, even on a short-term basis, it leaves the US with only one aircraft carrier in the conflict area.
The claim by the Navy that the damage to the Ford does not render it fully mission capable conflicts with independent evaluations of the damage. Over two hundred sailors received treatment because of smoke inhalation. Two of the sailors had been lacerated. One of them was withdrawn from the ship to undergo further treatment.
The extent of fire destruction was much further than the laundry room, and it burned out berthing areas and burned over 100 racks. The Navy was tasked to remove 1,000 mattresses from the future USS John F. Kennedy, which was currently under construction at Newport News, Virginia, and send them to Crete. In the near aftermath, some 600 of the sailors slept on floors and tables.
The entire response process, which included putting out the fire, smoke mitigation, checking flare-ups, and the restoration of the impacted areas, took over 30 hours, as reported by the USNI News. The actual fire, as reported by the New York Times, had initially been stated to have lasted 30 hours, and this number was later rectified by the Navy.
A Carrier Straining to Before the Fire
On Day 272 of a deployment that had started in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 24, 2025, the Ford came to the port of Souda Bay. It already outstripped most post-Vietnam carrier deployments. When deployed longer than mid-April, it will surpass the current post-Vietnam record of 294 days of the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2020. The record of 332 days is the one of USS Midway in the Vietnam War.
That was not the first mechanical crisis the ship had been involved in. The Ford has been plagued by the vacuum plumbing collapses of 650 of its onboard toilets- an issue that has been caused by the design failures with its state-of-the-art waste management system. The carrier requested external plumbing services 42 times since 2023, with 32 of them in 2025 alone. The Navy claimed that the plumbing problem did not affect combat operations.
One of the carriers remained in the Conflict Zone
The USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which is the only American carrier, provides its support to Operation Epic Fury at the moment when the Ford is already in Greece. Lincoln had been running the Ford since the very opening of the war.
According to the report by The Hill, the US military has a single aircraft carrier left in the conflict zone unless Washington provides one to replace it, which would take weeks to complete, considering the deployment patterns and preparation schedules of the rest of the fleet.
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The Ford will spend longer than a week in repairs at Souda Bay. It is not yet known whether it will be brought back to the Red Sea after that or found to need some depot-level repairs, which would put it back in the United States. Early reports of the fire indicated that depot-level efforts (USNI News) might be required, but the Navy has not officially confirmed such an evaluation.
