Bye-Bye Bombs: USS Tripoli Offloads Ammunition

by Petty Officer 2nd Class Malcolm Kelley

02 February 2023 SAN DIEGO, CA, UNITED STATES -- Sailors aboard amphibious assault carrier USS Tripoli (LHA 7) completed an ammunition offload Jan. 27, 2023.
Tripoli’s Air and Weapons Departments worked with Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 23 to transport approximately 1.9 million pounds of ordnance from Tripoli to Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station.
After wrapping up the ship’s maiden deployment in November of 2022, Tripoli still had to remove unspent ammunition, which required the crew to go underway once again, said Aviation Ordnanceman 1st Class Johnanthony Campbell, from Cincinnati, Ohio.
“There aren’t piers equipped to deal with that much ordnance, which is why we’re using helicopters carry it off instead of going pierside.” said Campbell.
Aviation Ordnanceman 2nd Class Dasia Lewis, a Selma, Alabama native, said Aviation Ordnancemen loaded ammunition onto cargo elevators in the magazines and transported it to the flight deck, where it could be attached to a helicopter and flown off. “Everything from weapons department’s side of things went really smoothly,” Lewis said.
On the flight deck, Sailors from Tripoli’s air department attached pallets of ammunition to the undersides of MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopters as they hovered over the flight deck. After one pallet was flown off, another helicopter would swoop in within minutes to take the next.
“I think the most challenging part of the offload was working with the helicopters,” Lewis said. “It did take a while to get the ammo from the ship to shore, but you can’t sacrifice safety for speed.”
Transporting cargo with fast-moving helicopters might look hazardous to the untrained eye, but the process followed stringent planning, rules and guidelines, Campbell said.
“It looks chaotic, but there’s actually a specific order that Fallbrook has to receive the ammo. Each day is set up for a certain kind of ordnance group, and we have to sling it a certain way to offload it.”
Offloading the ammunition was the last major evolution the crew aboard Tripoli had to accomplish before entering a planned 12-month maintenance availability.
Tripoli is an America-class amphibious assault carrier homeported in San Diego. For more information about Tripoli, head to the command’s Facebook (www.facebook.com/usstripoli) and Instagram (www.instgram.com/officialusstripoli) pages.
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