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USS Aries (PHM 5)

USS ARIES was the fifth ship in the PEGASUS class of hydrofoil boats. She was homeported in Key West, Florida, and on July 30, 1993, all six ships of her class were decommissioned and stricken from the Navy list. AQUILA was sold for scrapping on August 19, 1996, but was subsequently acquired by a preservation group - the USS ARIES PHM 5 Hydrofoil Memorial, Inc. - for rehabilitation as a memorial/museum at Gasconade, Missouri.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USS ARIES. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

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USS ARIES History:

USS ARIES was part of the U.S. Navy's late-Cold War experiment with very fast, missile-armed hydrofoils intended to complicate an adversary's coastal operations while also offering a nimble platform for presence, training, and - especially from Florida - maritime law-enforcement support in cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard. The ship was ordered on October 20, 1977, built by Boeing Marine Systems at Renton, Washington, laid down on July 7, 1980, launched on November 5, 1981, and commissioned on September 18, 1982. Her initial leadership reflected the "small ship, high tempo" character of the hydrofoil force: the decommissioning program later recorded Lieutenant Commander Michael P. Getter as the first commanding officer (beginning in September 1982), followed by a steady succession of short command tours that kept the ship's operations tightly tied to squadron cycles and readiness demands.

After commissioning, USS ARIES operated in the Puget Sound area until she began the long relocation to her assigned operational homeport in the Florida Keys. On November 23, 1982, she got underway for Key West, Florida, and made brief calls at San Francisco and San Diego while working down the U.S. West Coast. She transited the Panama Canal on December 11, 1982, entered the Atlantic side, and arrived at Key West on December 15, 1982. After the holiday stand-down, the ship shifted quickly from "new construction" patterns into an operational routine built around trials, training, and real-world tasking in the Caribbean basin.

Acceptance trials were completed in late January 1983. In February 1983, USS ARIES carried out her first law-enforcement operation against drug smugglers in cooperation with the Coast Guard - an early indicator of how often these hydrofoils would be employed in the Caribbean security environment of the 1980s, when the U.S. maritime approach increasingly blended naval readiness with interagency counter-smuggling operations. March and April 1983 brought training out of Key West and two additional Coast Guard support missions. In each case, USS ARIES embarked a Coast Guard detachment and conducted the mission under the operational control of Coast Guard District 7, headquartered in Miami, Florida. Early in May 1983, she entered Atlantic Drydock at Jacksonville, Florida, for roughly six weeks of post-shakedown repairs and modifications - typical for a new class where early operational feedback drove rapid changes. By mid-June 1983, USS ARIES returned to Key West and resumed a normal operating schedule.

The second half of 1983 mixed routine training evolutions, tests, and calibrations with periodic real-world tasking. During the second week of August 1983, USS ARIES participated in another anti-smuggling sweep, and later that month she visited Nassau, Bahamas, before returning to the Key West operating area for continuing local operations. Through the remainder of 1983 and into early 1984, her day-to-day rhythm remained focused on readiness and patrol-area familiarity around the Florida Straits - a geography central to U.S. maritime security because it connects the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic approaches to the U.S. southeast.

In February 1984, USS ARIES expanded her operations beyond the immediate Key West vicinity to include the Gulf of Mexico and the east coast of Central America, operating in waters that were strategically sensitive in the early 1980s due to regional instability, U.S. security assistance efforts, and persistent trafficking routes. In late April 1984, she participated in Exercise Ocean Venture 84, a large U.S. Navy exercise series intended to test readiness and tactics in complex scenarios and to sharpen fleet-wide coordination. USS ARIES returned to Key West at the end of May 1984, conducted normal operations into early June, and then shifted again to a major multinational activity: on June 11, 1984, she departed Key West for Puerto Rico waters to participate in the initial phase of Unitas XXV (the 1984 edition of the long-running annual exercise series with Latin American navies). At the end of June 1984, USS ARIES proceeded back to Key West. In August 1984, she took part in maneuvers off the east coast of Central America, then returned to Key West by the end of August to resume a training schedule.

The ship's 1985 pattern shows the hydrofoil force's characteristic blend of local operations, periodic readiness exercises, and recurring Unitas participation. USS ARIES spent the remainder of 1984 and the first part of 1985 operating near Key West, then in March 1985 traveled to Puerto Rico for READEX 1-85 (a readiness exercise designed to stress ships and crews in short-notice, high-tempo scenarios). After returning to homeport operations in April, she voyaged in early May 1985 to Onslow Beach, North Carolina, to participate in Exercise Solid Shield 85, a major amphibious and joint training event that also provided a demanding environment for fast small combatants to practice screening, surveillance, and attack profiles. In mid-June 1985, USS ARIES was again near Puerto Rico for the initial phase of Unitas XXVI. July and early August 1985 were spent in normal Key West-based operations, followed by a third fleet readiness exercise in the last half of August 1985. She resumed local operations in September 1985 and remained engaged in the Key West operating area through the end of the year.

At the end of the first week of January 1986, USS ARIES shifted to Mayport, Florida, for a three-month availability - an important maintenance window for a high-speed craft whose performance depended on tightly controlled mechanical condition and careful systems upkeep. She returned to Key West at the end of April 1986 and operated there until late July. In late July 1986, she embarked on a cruise into the Caribbean for another Unitas exercise, during which she made port calls at La Guaira, Venezuela, and at St. John's, Antigua. USS ARIES returned to Key West on August 14, 1986, then conducted local training through mid-October. On October 14, 1986, she sailed for Little Creek, Virginia, to participate in a special project for the Chief of Naval Operations, dividing her time over the next two months between operations off the Virginia Capes and returns to her homeport. She concluded that development work on December 12, 1986, headed back toward Key West on December 16, 1986, and reentered Key West on December 17, 1986, spending the remainder of the year operating in that vicinity.

USS ARIES remained in commission for nearly seven more years, continuing service within the Key West-centered hydrofoil community under a sequence of commanding officers recorded in the 1993 decommissioning program. That record shows command passing from Lieutenant Commander Richard P. Bodkin (beginning in November 1984) through Lieutenant Commander Thomas P. Hines (September 1986), Lieutenant Commander James M. Coffey (September 1988), Lieutenant Commander Thomas G. Yingst (September 1989), Lieutenant Commander Michael J. Gorman (September 1990), Lieutenant Commander David A. Dow (September 1990 to June 1992), Lieutenant Commander Robert J. DeMars (June 1992 to July 1993), and finally Lieutenant Commander Robert L. Swisher during the ship's closing weeks in July 1993. Within that late-service window, a specific, dated technical milestone is documented: during December 1989, a prototype on-line compressor washing system was installed aboard USS ARIES on each of her two ship service gas turbine engines, remaining under evaluation as of December 1990 - part of the Navy's broader push to manage fouling and maintain performance in salt-laden maritime environments.

USS ARIES was decommissioned on July 30, 1993, closing the operational chapter of the Navy's missile hydrofoil squadron era. In the mid-1990s, the ship's administrative disposition shifted from retirement to reuse: Navy inactive ship records list August 19, 1996, as her removal/disposal milestone as a "scrap sale", followed by an April 30, 1997 contract modification "for reuse", consistent with the ship's survival into civilian preservation rather than demolition. By 1996, a preservation group - USS ARIES PHM 5 Hydrofoil Memorial, Inc. - had acquired the ship for rehabilitation as a memorial/museum at Gasconade, Missouri, centered on hydrofoil history, and USS ARIES became (and remains) the most prominent surviving representative of the U.S. Navy's PEGASUS-class hydrofoils, bridging the gap between a specialized Cold War concept and public historical interpretation.

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