The aircraft carrier Forrestal is towed out of its berth Tuesday and into Narragansett Bay, heading for Philadelphia. The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

MIDDLETOWN — Like a frail elder being helped out of bed, the rusty old aircraft carrier was carefully nudged away from the pier where it has sat idle for the past 16 years and slowly towed out to sea by doting tugboats on all sides. Still, the 1,067-foot Forrestal managed to regain its massive majesty as it traveled beneath the Claiborne Pell Bridge under blue skies one last time. “She’s tired,” said Steve Quadrilla, who watched from a nearby charter boat as the vessel that was his home from 1969 to 1972 passed. But, he said, “To see her moving along was a good feeling.” Decommissioned and tied up at Naval Station Newport in 1998, the Forrestal remained an eye-catching fixture on the Aquidneck Island shoreline ever since. By itself, the ship was a sight to behold. But since the Forrestal was docked alongside the Saratoga, another mothballed aircraft carrier that arrived the same year, the pair grabbed even more attention. Soon, however, the Navy base, once home to a bustling fleet of active warships, won’t even have any relics left. The Iowa, the retired World War II-era battleship, departed in 2001. And plans are under way for the Saratoga, the last remaining mothballed warship at the base, to also be towed away. It’s likely to depart in 2011, with the scrap yard its final destination. The Forrestal’s fate is uncertain. But as with the Saratoga, any hope of turning it into a floating museum was scuttled after the Navy determined that no viable proposals had been offered. As a result, the Forrestal will be towed to a Navy storage site in Philadelphia, due to arrive on Thursday, and will either be dismantled or sunk to create an artificial reef So large it was classified as a supercarrier, the nearly 60,000-ton Forrestal was launched in 1954. Despite its size, it could still attain speeds of 33 knots. The Forrestal saw action in the Vietnam War — as well as tragedy. On July 29, 1967, while operating in the Gulf of Tonkin and serving as a base for air strikes into North Vietnam, a rocket aboard the Forrestal misfired, igniting a massive fire that burned for hours, killing 134, and destroying 21 aircraft. Quadrilla, 62, of Plainville, Mass., was a petty officer second class while serving aboard the Forrestal two years after the fire. After both he and the ship retired, he joined other members of the USS Forrestal Association for exclusive Veterans Day ceremonies alongside the ship, docked at Pier 1 in Middletown. The association learned about the impending departure of the Forrestal, and Quadrilla, head of the New England chapter of the group, arranged to board the charter boat Amazing Grace with about a dozen others to watch the momentous event up close. It took a half-dozen smaller tugboats and the 226-foot, ocean-going Navy tug Apache to move the Forrestal from the dock and out into Narragansett Bay. “I couldn’t even imagine what it was like for the people that were crossing over the Newport bridge and looking at this massive aircraft carrier and not knowing what was going on,” he said. Navy spokesman Lisa Rama agreed, saying, “You would had to have been texting, reading a book or sleeping to not realize the vessel was going under that bridge.” Rama said that the Forrestal’s departure attracted a great deal of attention on the base. Both the Officers Club and Enlisted Club opened earlier than usual for personnel to gather and take in the spectacle and people driving down roads on the base pulled over to watch. “A lot of folks were lining the waterfront on the base,” said Rama. “A lot of folks are sentimental. The only vessel that’s left is the USS Saratoga. It looks a lot different at Pier 1.”