USNI News: Carrier USS Gerald R. Ford Enters Year-Long Post-Shakedown Maintenance and Upgrade Period
After spending 81 days at sea spread out during eight steaming events, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) is back at Huntington Ingalls Industries Newport News Shipbuilding for a year-long maintenance and upgrade period.
For the next year, Ford’s post-shakedown availability (PSA)/selected restricted availability (SRA) will concentrate on installing the aircraft carrier’s remaining combat systems, completing any deferred work and correcting a propulsion manufacturing defect discovered in January.
Discovering the propulsion train component defect delayed the PSA start from April to now, Bill Couch, a NAVSEA spokesman told USNI News on Monday. Originally intended to last about eight months, the PSA was extended to 12 months to also accommodate deferred work such as constructing an advanced weapons elevator and upgrading the advanced arresting gear.
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WNU Editor: It may be the world's most advanced aircraft carrier, but it is at a steep price.
3 comments:
The US Navy has misfired on the Ford, DDG-1000 and LCS programs and done poorly. On the other hand, the SSN Virgina's, LPD's, Burkes are performing just great. So at least the USN can execute complex programs at a professional level. Next big job is to fire those still around for the misfires, or at least make sure people like them don't get promoted. Concurrent with that is taking lessons learned from the good programs and make sure Columbia, new frigate and cruiser programs all are grounded in those best practices.
Chinese are in mass production of a blue water fleet these days, USN can't screw around any longer.
Wow, a brand new $15 billion ship that has not even deployed yet needs 12 months of maintenance!
Anon,
Very well said. Unfortunately firing people who have government seems to be rather difficult. Also, keeping them from being promoted is problematic as well as promotions within government ranks seem to be based more on seniority as opposed to competence.
Your suggestions of how to move forward are sound. Fortunately in the White House at least we finally have competent leadership but it will take some time to fix the prior damage. Also, those who screwed it up in the first place are fighting tooth and nail to undercut everything. You are correct that the US Navy can't "screw around" any more.
In fact, the Chinese may have already overtaken us. There is a disturbing tendency among US officials to both overestimate our abilities while underestimating those of adversaries.
Carl,
That is a steep price. Actually I think the best description of an aircraft carrier is "floating death trap." Given the advances our major adversaries have made in anti-ship technologies these things actually have very limited utility. The steep price is yet another illustration of what I have been pointing out here and elsewhere for quite some time. Essentially how much money a nation spends on its military is the least important statistic when trying to determine how nations stack up against each other militarily.
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