Enterprise was commissioned in 1938, while the Forrestal-class USS Independence was launched in 1958. Independence displaced about 61,000 tons standard and 81,937 tons at full load, more than three times Enterprise's nominal standard figure. The comparison pairs different aircraft measures: Enterprise's 80 to 90 airframes included spares and boxed aircraft, while Independence's 70 to 90 figure described her air group. Even with that caveat, the scale change shows how quickly jet aircraft drove carrier size upward. Enterprise was too small and structurally constrained for an economical modernization comparable to those later given to the Midway class. A useful reserve ship needed some prospect of reactivation, and rebuilding Enterprise for postwar service would have replaced almost everything except parts of the hull and her name. Those limits made mothballing unattractive and preservation harder to justify.
Notable Point · 49:06-52:57
Carrier growth made preservation impractical
Twenty years of aircraft growth turned the Yorktown-sized hull into a poor candidate for postwar modernization or reserve.