Previous ships called Eagle
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USS Eagle (1798)
The first USS Eagle, a schooner, was built at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, in 1798, and commissioned in the Revenue Cutter Service under the command of Captain H. G. Campbell, USRCS. She was transferred to the Navy in July 1798 for service in the undeclared naval war (Quasi-War) with France, and placed on the permanent Navy List in April 1800.
From October 1798 Eagle patrolled off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia protecting American shipping from French privateers. Ordered to the West Indies, she arrived at Prince Rupert's Bay, Dominica, 14 March 1799, to hunt French ships, and to convoy merchant vessels on the Guadeloupe Station until late in June, when she sailed for Newcastle, Delaware. She returned to the Caribbean in August 1799 for similar duty until 10 September 1800 when she set sail for St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, with the sloop-of-war Maryland, escorting a convoy of 52 ships. After arrival at Newcastle on 28 September, Eagle was laid up for repairs. Eagle's third cruise to the West Indies extended from January to June 1801, when she returned to Baltimore.
During her career of protecting United States' rights on the high seas, she captured or assisted in the capture of 22 French vessels which had been preying on American ocean commerce. Eagle was sold 17 June 1801.
USS Eagle (1812)
The second USS Eagle, a sloop, was a merchant ship purchased on Lake Champlain in 1812 and fitted for naval service. She cruised on the lake under the command of Sailing Master J. Loomis as a member of Commodore Thomas Macdonough's squadron blockading the British advance from Canada. Eagle was captured by the enemy 3 June 1813 near ile aux Noix on the Canadian side of the lake and taken into the Royal Navy as Finch.
During her services as a British ship she accompanied the expedition which burned the arsenal and storehouses at Plattsburg, New York. She was recaptured by the Americans during the great victory of the Battle of Lake Champlain 11 September 1814 and taken back into the U.S. Navy. After the war she was sold in July 1815 at Whitehall, New York.
USS Eagle (1814)
The third USS Eagle, a brig, was launched 11 August 1814 as Surprise at Vergennes, Vermont, by Adam and Noah Brown. She was renamed Eagle 6 September and placed under the command of Lieutenant R. Henley.
Finished in bare time to participate in the decisive Battle of Lake Champlain on 11 September 1814, Eagle rendered gallant service. As the first vessel in the American line she was holed 39 times and had 13 men killed and 20 wounded. After the battle she was laid up for preservation at Whitehall, New York, but was sold in 1825.
USS Eagle (1898)
The fourth USS Eagle served in the United States Navy from 1898 to 1919, and saw action in the Spanish-American War and World War I.
Eagle, a yacht, was built in 1890 as Almy by Harlan and Hollingsworth, Wilmington, Delaware; purchased by the Navy 2 April 1898 and renamed Eagle; and commissioned 3 days later, Lieutenant W. H. H. Southerland in command.
Eagle sailed from New York 17 April 1898 for duty with the North Atlantic Squadron on blockade and dispatch duty in Cuban waters. On 29 June she shelled the Spanish battery at Rio Honda and on 12 July captured the Spanish merchantman Santo Domingo. Eagle returned to Norfolk 22 August 1898 to be fitted out for surveying duty, her principal employment through the remainder of her naval service. She compiled new charts and corrected existing ones for the waters surrounding Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti.
Troubled conditions throughout the Caribbean often interrupted Eagle's surveying duty and she gave varied service in protecting American interests. She patrolled off Haiti in January and February 1908 and again in November and December and off Nicaragua in December 1909. In June 1912 she transported Marines to Santiago de Cuba and Siboney to protect American lives and property during a rebellion in Cuba, and continued to investigate conditions and serve as base ship for the Marines until 1914. She also had gunboat duty with a cruiser squadron during the Haiti operation of July 1915 to March 1916 and was commended by the Secretary of the Navy for her creditable performance of widely varied duty. She then remained off Haiti to conduct surveys.
With American entry into World War I, Eagle returned to Cuban waters. She was attached to American Patrol Detachment, Atlantic Fleet, and throughout 1917 and 1918 was continually on patrol off Cuba, Santo Domingo, and the southern coast of the United States. From Key West, where she arrived 3 April 1918, she patrolled the Florida Straits and after the end of the war operated on target practice, and tactical exercises and maneuvers. Between 7 January and 15 March 1919 she made a cruise to Cuban ports and along the Gulf coast before being detached from the American Patrol Detachment 28 April. Eagle left Key West the following day for Portsmouth Navy Yard. She was decommissioned there 23 May 1919 and sold 3 January 1920.
HMS Eagle (1918)
HMS Eagle was an aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy sunk during World War II.
The Eagle was laid down at the Armstrong yards at Newcastle-on-Tyne on February 20, 1913. She was to be the battleship Almirante Cochrane for the Chilean Navy. Her construction was halted with the outbreak of World War I. In 1917 she was acquired for the Royal Navy, at a cost of ÿ£1.3 million, to be converted into the carrier HMS Eagle. She was the fourteenth ship to bear that name.
Her initial redesign was as a base for sea-plane operations. After trials with other ships the design was changed to a proper fleet carrier with a full flight deck and 'island'. She was launched on June 8, 1918 but the delays meant that the Eagle was unfinished at the end of hostilities. Construction was halted and not resumed until 1920 and she was only commissioned on February 26, 1924.
In September 1939 the Eagle was based at Singapore with an air-arm of eighteen Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers. Her first offensive action of the war was as part of the hunt for the Admiral Graf Spee. She began 1940 in the Indian Ocean, but after repairs to explosion damage in March she joined the major units Malaya, Ramillies, Royal Sovereign and Warspite in the eastern Mediterranean at Alexandria in May.
Swordfish bombers from Eagle attacked the harbour at Tobruk on July 5 and sank an Italian destroyer and two marchantmen, a similar attack two weeks later (July 20) sank another two destroyers. On July 9 she was part of an ineffectual clash with the Italian fleet at Calabria, sometimes called the Battle of Punto Stila.
On 22 August her aircraft attacked and sank an Italian submarine and a depot ship in the Gulf of Bomba. In September she met up with the carrier Illustrious as part of Operation Hats, and supported an attack on Maritza, Rhodes.
In mid-October she was part of the cover for a Malta convoy (MB-6). Her aircraft flew from Illustrious during the attack on Taranto (Operation Judgement, November 11), the damaged Eagle remained in Alexandria. On the 26th her aircraft attacked Tripoli.
In March 1941 she was assigned to Freetown. Her aircraft, flying from Port Sudan, attacked Italian ships at Massawa en route. She arrived at Freetown in early May, remaining there until October 1941.
She returned to Britain for a refit and rejoined the Mediterranean Fleet early in 1942. In February 1942 she carried aircraft for Malta, an operation repeated in May and twice in June. In June she also provided air cover for the convoy of Operation Harpoon (12th to 16th).
Her final action was in August 1942 as cover for the Malta-bound convoy of Operation Pedestal. On the early morning of August 11 she was hit by four torpedoes from U-73 of Helmut Rosenbaum and sank 70 nm south of Cape Salinas. The majority of the crew survived (927, only 160 lost) and were picked from the sea by her escorts.
USS Eagle (AM132) (1942)
USS Captor (PYc-40), briefly known as USS Eagle (AM-132) was a Q-ship of the United States Navy.
Harvard, a steel-hulled trawler, was built in 1938 by Bethlehem Steel Company, Quincy, Massachusetts, handed over to General Sea Foods Corporation, Boston, and put into service with the name Wave assigned.
The fishing trawler served in that capacity until 1 January 1942, when she was acquired by the Navy as part of the Auxiliary Vessels Act. Reporting to the Portsmouth Navy Yard in New Hampshire, the trawler began conversion to war service as a minesweeper on 8 January. With the work complete on 28 February, she was named Eagle, given the hull classification symbol AM-132, and placed in commission 5 March 1942, Lieutenant Commander Leroy E. Rogers, USNR, in command.
Along with Asterion (AK-100) and Atik (AK-101), Eagle was selected early to participate in a secret "Q-ship" program. The intention was to disguise the ship as a defenseless civilian vessel and, after luring an enemy submarine into close quarters on the surface, open fire with hidden guns and sink the unsuspecting U-boat. For this reason, Eagle remained at Portsmouth, where she underwent further conversion into a Q-ship and received weapons and sonar gear. During this second conversion, the minesweeper was renamed Captor and redesignated PYc-40 on 18 April. With alterations complete on 19 May, the vessel reported for duty with the 1st Naval District at Boston.
Unlike the other four ships eventually in the Q-ship program, Captor did not sail in convoys or along coastal shipping routes. Instead, she operated in the waters near Boston -- in Massachusetts Bay, north to Casco Bay, east to the Georges Bank, and south to Nantucket Sound and Rhode Island Sound. While at sea, the disguised Q-ship also helped cover the coastal convoy routes coming north from New York. As growing air and sea patrols had driven most U-boats away from the New England coast in May 1942, Captor had little chance to spot an enemy submarine and ended her wartime career without a single sighting.
With the decline in the U-boat threat to the east coast of the United States late in the war, Captor was decommissioned at Boston on 4 October 1944. Stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 14 October 1944, the trawler was transferred to the War Shipping Administration and sold on 21 February 1945. The ultimate fate of the ship is unknown.
HMS Eagle (cancelled)
A 36,800 ton carrier to be named Eagle was laid down on 19 April 1944, but cancelled the following year
HMS Eagle (R05) (1946)
HMS Eagle was one of the two largest British aircraft carriers ever built.
Initially laid down in 1942 at Harland and Wolff's, Belfast yard as one of four ships of the Audacious-class were laid down during World War II as part of the British naval buildup during that conflict. However, two were cancelled at the end of hostilities, and the remaining two were suspended. Originally Audacious, she was finally launched as Eagle (the fifteenth Royal Navy ship to be so named) in March 1946 after the proposed ship of that name was cancelled.
A number of changes were incorporated into the design, although Eagle was launched too early to see an angled flight deck installed, and the ship was commissioned in October 1951. Her first wartime service came in 1956, when she took part in the Suez Crisis. The ship's aircraft of that period included Westland Wyverns, Douglas Skyraiders, Armstrong Whitworth Sea Hawks and de Havilland Sea Venoms.
In 1959 she was taken to Devonport Dockyard for an extensive refit and modernisation. She was re-commissioned in 1964 as a very new and different ship. In addition to major improvements to her accommodation, machinery and weaponry she also acquired an angled deck, enlarged island and as a result of all these plus more changes; an increased displacement (+50,000 tons). This made her the largest ship in the Royal Navy. By this time, the airwing had changed to Blackburn Buccaneer, Sea Vixen and Fairey Gannet aircraft. The Supermarine Scimitar also saw service on the ship during this period before being replaced by the Buccaneer.
However, by the mid-1960s, the British Government had decided that the days of the large Royal Navy aircraft carrier were limited. The fleet was swiftly run down, with Eagle being the penultimate to decommission. She left RN service in 1972, but was used as a parts hulk for Ark Royal until the latter decommissioned as well in 1978. Eagle was then swiftly scrapped.
Eagle (Apollo 11 Lunar Module)
The first Apollo landing site, in the southern Sea of Tranquility about 20 km (12 mi) southwest of the crater Sabine D, was selected in part because it had been characterized as relatively flat and smooth by the automated Ranger 8 and Surveyor 5 landers, as well as by Lunar Orbiter mapping spacecraft, and therefore unlikely to present major landing or Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) challenges. Armstrong bestowed the name 'Tranquillity Base' on the landing site immediately after touchdown.
On 20 July, 1969, while on the far side of the Moon, the lunar module, called "Eagle," separated from the Command Module, named "Columbia". Collins, now alone aboard Columbia, carefully inspected Eagle as it pirouetted before him. Soon after, Armstrong and Aldrin fired Eagle's engine and began their descent. They soon saw that they were "running long"; Eagle was 4 seconds further along its descent trajectory than planned, and would land miles west of the intended site. The LM navigation and guidance computer reported several "program alarms" as it guided the LM's descent. These alarms tore the crew's attention away from the scene outside as the descent proceeded. In NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, a young controller named Steve Bales was able to tell the flight director that it was safe to continue the descent in spite of the alarms. Once they were able to return their attention to the view outside, the astronauts saw that their computer was guiding them toward a landing site full of large rocks scattered around a large crater. Armstrong took manual control of the lunar module at that point, and guided it to a landing at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 20 with less than 30 seconds' worth of fuel left.
The program alarms were "executive overflows", indicating that the computer could not finish its work in the time allotted. The cause was later determined to be that the LM rendezvous radar was left on during the descent, causing the computer to spend unplanned time servicing the unused radar. Steve Bales received a Medal of Freedom for his "go" call under pressure.
At 2:56 UTC, six and a half hours after landing, Armstrong made his descent to the Moon surface and took his famous "one giant leap for mankind." Aldrin joined him, and the two spent two-and-a-half hours drilling core samples, photographing what they saw and collecting rocks.
They planned placement of the Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package (EASEP) and the U.S. flag by studying their landing site through Eagle's twin triangular windows, which gave them a 60° field of view. Preparation required longer than the two hours scheduled. Armstrong had some initial difficulties squeezing through the hatch with his PLSS. According to veteran moonwalker John Young, a redesign of the LM to incorporate a smaller hatch was not followed by a redesign of the PLSS backpack, so some of the highest heart rates recorded from Apollo astronauts occurred during LM egress and ingress.
The Remote Control Unit controls on Armstrong's chest prevented him from seeing his feet. While climbing down the nine-rung ladder, Armstrong pulled a D-ring to deploy the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) folded against Eagle's side and activate the TV camera. The first images used a Slow-scan television system and were picked up at Goldstone in the USA but with better fidelity by Honeysuckle Creek in Australia. Minutes later the TV was switched to normal television, and the feed was switched to the more sensitive radio telescope station at the Parkes Observatory in Australia. Despite some technical and weather difficulties, ghostly black and white images of the first lunar EVA were received and were immediately broadcast to at least 600 million people on Earth.
After describing the surface ("very fine grained... almost like a powder"), Armstrong stepped off Eagle's footpad and into history as the first human to set foot on another world. He reported that moving in the Moon's gravity, one-sixth of Earth's, was "perhaps even easier than the simulations."
In addition to fulfilling President John F. Kennedy's mandate to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s, Apollo 11 was an engineering test of the Apollo system; therefore, Armstrong snapped photos of the LM so engineers would be able to judge its post-landing condition. He then collected a contingency soil sample using a sample bag on a stick. He folded the bag and tucked it into a pocket on his right thigh. He removed the TV camera from the MESA, made a panoramic sweep, and mounted it on a tripod 12 m (40 ft) from the LM. The TV camera cable remained partly coiled and presented a tripping hazard throughout the EVA.
Aldrin joined him on the surface and tested methods for moving around, including two-footed kangaroo hops. The PLSS backpack created a tendency to tip backwards, but neither astronaut had serious problems maintaining balance. Loping became the preferred method of movement. The astronauts reported that they needed to plan their movements six or seven steps ahead. The fine soil was quite slippery. Aldrin remarked that moving from sunlight into Eagle's shadow produced no temperature change inside the suit, though the helmet was warmer in sunlight, so he felt cooler in shadow.
Together the astronauts planted the U.S. flag - the ground was too hard to permit them to insert the pole more than about 20 cm (8 in) - then took a phone call from President Richard Nixon.
The MESA failed to provide a stable work platform and was in shadow, slowing work somewhat. As they worked, the moonwalkers kicked up gray dust which soiled the outer part of their suits, the integrated thermal meteoroid garment.
They deployed the EASEP, which included a passive seismograph and a laser ranging retroreflector. Then Armstrong loped about 120 m (400 ft) from the LM to snap photos at the rim of East Crater while Aldrin collected two core tubes. He used the geological hammer to pound in the tubes - the only time the hammer was used on Apollo 11. The astronauts then collected rock samples using scoops and tongs on extension handles. Many of the surface activities took longer than expected, so they had to stop documented sample collection halfway through the allotted 34 min.
During this period Mission Control used a coded phrase to warn Armstrong that his metabolic rates were high and that he should slow down. He was moving rapidly from task to task as time ran out. Rates remained generally lower than expected for both astronauts throughout the walk, however, so Mission Control granted the astronauts a 15 minute extension.
Aldrin entered Eagle first. With some difficulty the astronauts lifted film and two sample boxes containing more than 22 kg (48 lb) of lunar surface material to the LM hatch using a flat cable pulley device called the Lunar Equipment Conveyor. Armstrong then jumped to the ladder's third rung and climbed into the LM.
After transferring to LM life support, the explorers lightened the ascent stage for return to lunar orbit by tossing out their PLSS backpacks, lunar overshoes, one Hasselblad camera, and other equipment. Then they lifted off in Eagle's ascent stage to rejoin CMP Michael Collins aboard Columbia in lunar orbit. Eagle was jettisoned and left in lunar orbit. Later NASA reports mentioned that Eagle's orbit had decayed resulting in it impacting in an "uncertain location" on the lunar surface.
After more than 21½ hours on the lunar surface, they returned to Collins on board "Columbia," bringing 20.87 kilograms of lunar samples with them. The two Moon-walkers had left behind scientific instruments such as a retroreflector array used for the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. They also left an American flag and other mementos, including a plaque (mounted on the LM Descent Stage ladder) bearing two drawings of Earth (of the Western and Eastern Hemispheres), an inscription, and signatures of the astronauts and Richard Nixon. The inscription read:
Here Men From Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.
USS Eagle (NCC-956)
The USS Eagle (NCC-956) was a Federation starship in service in the 23rd century.
The Eagle was among the starships that would have been assembled for the abandoned assault code-named Operation: Retrieve, which would have rescued Captain James Kirk and Doctor Leonard McCoy from Qo'noS in 2293. (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
