For sixty years, one of the most welcome sounds on an American aircraft carrier was not a fighter. It was the drone of two big turboprops on approach. The C-2 Greyhound brought the mail, the spare parts, the fresh food, and the sailors heading home on leave. On 25 June 2026, aboard USS Nimitz, one made the last carrier landing the type will ever make.

A C-2A of the “Rawhides” of Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 40 trapped aboard the Nimitz, then took the catapult shot off the bow — the final arrested landing and launch of a Greyhound at sea. After nearly six decades, the Navy’s Carrier Onboard Delivery mission belongs to someone else now.

That someone is the CMV-22B Osprey, the tiltrotor that has quietly taken over one of the fleet’s most important and least glamorous jobs.

The plane that kept the carrier running

Every carrier at sea depends on a steady trickle of parts, mail, people, and priority cargo from shore. That is the Carrier Onboard Delivery, or COD, mission, and since 1966 the C-2 has owned it. Derived from the E-2 Hawkeye radar plane, the Greyhound has folding wings, a rear cargo ramp, and the structural toughness to be slammed onto a pitching deck and yanked to a stop by an arresting wire — day after day, for generations.

It was never the aircraft anyone painted on a recruiting poster. But ask any sailor who spent months at sea what “the COD is inbound” meant, and you will get the same answer: letters from home, and a box of something that had not come out of the ship’s galley.

Why retire a workhorse that works?

The short answer is age and commonality. The Greyhound airframes are 1960s designs, and spare parts for a small, elderly fleet only get harder to find. The Osprey, by contrast, shares parts and training with the Marine Corps’ MV-22, can fly farther, and can deliver to far more ships than just carriers — an amphibious assault ship or a destroyer, not only a flattop with a flight deck long enough to trap an aeroplane.

So the “no-fail” logistics job — the one the fleet literally cannot operate without — has passed to the tiltrotor.

The end of an era

The Greyhounds will keep flying from shore bases until later this year before they are fully retired, but their carrier days are over. The catapult shot off the Nimitz on 25 June was the last time one will ever be hurled off a flight deck.

A C-2A Greyhound catapult launch and arrested recovery — the violent, everyday ballet the type performed for six decades.

A fighter gets the glory. The Greyhound got the gratitude. Sixty years of mail calls and milk runs ended with one last trap on the Nimitz — and a generation of sailors who will always remember the sound of the COD coming home.

Sources: The War Zone; Janes; U.S. Navy.