In 2006, an American aircraft carrier with a dozen warships was trailed by a Chinese submarine. Years later US sold the ship for a cent

In October 2006, commander of the US Pacific Fleet went to China on a goodwill visit. Around the same time, in the East China Sea near Okinawa, a Chinese Song-class submarine was stealthily trailing a US aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk which was just returning from an exercise along with dozen more warships including an attack submarine as well as anti-submarine helicopters which are supposed to keep submarines away from the carrier. However, the Chinese submarine did not attack but to make a point, it choose to surface despite being in the attacking range of almost 18 homing torpedoes which it could not have evaded. Notably, no one knew that the submarine existed before that.

The incident was revealed by Washington Post on November 13, 2006. As per the report, the submarine stalked the battle group and “surfaced within firing range of its torpedoes and missiles” before being detected. China never explained what happened while the US buried it labelling it as classified.

The incident nontheless still raises military watchers - did the submarine puposely trailer the USS Kitty Hawk or it just wondered into the middle of a carrier group that failed to see it coming.

How the Chinese submarine embarrassed USS Kitty Hawk

The Chinese Song-class submarine was a diesel-electric boat which made it possible for it to creep behind the aircraf without making any noise. "A diesel-electric boat creeping on battery power has no reactor pumps, no steam plant, almost no machinery noise at all, and in the shallow, cluttered acoustics of littoral water it can run quieter than the nuclear submarines built to hunt it," explained military expert Harry J. Kazianis in an article in 19fortyfive.com.

The 2,200-ton submarine are comparably cheaper and are said to cost at about 100 million dollars. Years later, China replaced it with Yuan class submarines with the same quiet diesel-electric approach to air-independent propulsion.

USS Kitty Hawk sold for a cent

Commissioned on 29 Apr 1961, the USS Kitty Hawk displaced approximately 80,000 tons and carried more than 5,000 sailors and had speed of 30 + knots. It was later decommissioned on 12 May 2009. Many veterans reportedly wanted it to be preserved in a museum but the US govt rejected the petitions and the Kitty Hawk was sold to International Shipbreaking Limited of Brownsville, Texas, for one cent in 2021.