The oldest active-duty ship in the Navy, the USS Kitty Hawk, arrived yesterday at Pearl Harbor to participate in its final major exercise.

The 1,029-foot aircraft carrier tied up at Hotel Pier will be a centerpiece of the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or Rimpac, naval exercises. The monthlong 10-nation exercise is held to help navies of various countries operate together.

"Rimpac itself is a big multinational exercise," said Cmdr. Brian Goskowicz, an F/A-18 aviator and commanding officer of strike fighter squadron VFA-195 aboard the Kitty Hawk. "It's going to be a great opportunity to work with other countries and ... have our little exercises and games, and work with the different ships and airplanes as well as all the joint service."

This year's exercise includes 20,000 military personnel, 20 U.S. Navy ships, 13 foreign ships, two Coast Guard vessels, three U.S. submarines, three foreign submarines and more than 150 U.S. aircraft.

The Kitty Hawk was commissioned in 1961 and is to be decommissioned early next year at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Wash.

Its crew of about 5,000 enlisted sailors and 500 officers departed its home port in Yokosuka, Japan, on May 28 for the last time.

The Kitty Hawk is the replacement for the carrier George Washington, which was damaged by a fire last month and is being repaired.

The Kitty Hawk was built nearly half a century ago by the New York Shipbuilding Corp. in Camden, N.J., and commissioned at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on April 29, 1961.

It is the second ship named after a small town in North Carolina where the Wright Brothers made the first human flight.