Shortly after the invention of the airplane in the early 1900s, some military-minded maniac tried to launch one off of a ship. The experiment worked, and soon the American, British and Japanese navies began building aircraft carriers.

Like all military craft, carriers have a shelf life. The supercarrier USS Kitty Hawk, for instance, was built in 1956 and decommissioned in 2009; the only reason she's still floating is that the U.S. Navy is saving her as a backup until the USS Gerald Ford, another supercarrier, comes on-line in 2016. But a Washington-state Congressman, Rep. Jesse Young, has other plans for the Kitty Hawk, or any other carrier he can appropriate: He wants to turn them into a bridge.

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Congressman Young's plan sounds completely crazy, but his idea is to connect the Washington municipalities of Bremerton and Port Orchard with a bridge made out of aircraft carriers. "I know that people from around the world would come to drive across the deck of an aircraft carrier bridge, number one," Young told the Pacific Northwest's NW News Network. "Number two, it's the right thing to do from my standpoint because this is giving a testimony and a legacy memorial to our greatest generation."

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Although the rendering shows three carriers, Young believes the span across the Sinclair Inlet could be handled by two connected by a conventional span. He's reportedly got his eye on the two carriers awaiting the scrap pile at Bremetron's naval shipyard, the aforementioned Kitty Hawk and the USS Independence.

While it's presumably possible from an engineering standpoint—if a ship can launch an F-16, it can probably handle your average commuter's Ford Taurus—it would of course require naval cooperation, and the U.S. Navy doesn't seem interested. The Independence is scheduled to be scrapped later this year, they say, and the Kitty Hawk isn't going anywhere until the Gerald Ford is ready to sail.

Still, Congressman Young is undeterred, and is currently trying to push a $90,000 feasibility study through the legislature. "That is the beautiful thing about opportunities," he told the NSNN. "No one ever says they'll be easy, just that the greater the difficulty the greater the accomplishment."