US Navy’s top official says its new, first-in-class carrier is improving and sailors don’t want to get off

An aviation boatswain’s mate signals an F/A-18E Super Hornet on Ford’s flight deck during flight operations in the Atlantic, March 21, 2020.

The US Navy’s newest carrier, the first-in-class USS Gerald R. Ford, finished 2019 because the subject of
a war of words between, Congress, the Navy’s top civilian official, and therefore the shipbuilder,
Huntington Ingalls Industries.

In October, after criticism from lawmakers over the new carrier, then-Navy Secretary Richard
Spencer said confidence within the company’s senior leadership was “very, very low” which it had
“no idea” what it had been doing.

The Ford features a suite of latest technology, and its development has been suffering from cost overruns
and delays – its delivery to the Navy in May 2017 was two years late – though work thereon is
progressing.

The Ford, now within the fifth month of its 18-month post-delivery test and trials period, finished
aircraft compatibility testing at the top of January and authorized its landing deck and carrier
air-traffic center on March 20.

Those events attest to progress on the ship’s most vital systems, but “the most telling”
indicator is its sailors, acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly said in the week . (Spencer was ousted
in December over an unrelated matter.)

“To ask the sailors on the ship and see how they feel about it, particularly those that have
served on a Nimitz carrier before, they understand the difference. They recognize what proportion
more advanced this carrier is, what proportion easier … and safer it's for them to try to to their jobs,”
Modly said on a Annunciation edition of the Defense and Aerospace Report podcast.

“Many of them told me they never want to travel back to a Nimitz carrier after being on this one,”
Modly added, “and that’s for a ship that’s still kind of working through its shakedowns here. So I
think that’s a really telling sign, and usually i feel you get to the bottom truth once you ask
them.”

The Ford isn't out of the woods. The highest-profile problem now's its Advanced Weapons
Elevators, which use electromagnetic motors to lift more weaponry faster than elevators on
Nimitz-class carriers.

Four of the carrier’s 11 elevators are certified to be used , and a fifth soon are going to be , Modly said.
“The four that are certified have had thousands and thousands of cycles on them with no
problems – the fifth one, same thing.”

Shipbuilders are looking to certify two more elevators this year and to end the remainder around this
time next year, Modly added, echoing comments he made in January, when he said the elevators
had been “a disaster up so far .”

the matter isn’t that the elevators are broken, Modly said on the podcast. “It’s just they
haven’t been installed completely yet. They’re still within the installation process, and that’s just
taking tons longer than the shipyard thought it might take.”

Once the elevators are installed the most challenge is that the 70 doors and hatches through which
they move between the third deck , the most deck, and therefore the landing deck .

“The doors and hatches need to seal completely alternatively the elevator won’t proceed through the
different various decks, and there’s no thanks to override that,” Modly said.

of these 70 doors and hatches, “there’s 20 of them that are left to be done,” Modly said. “When
you check out the quantity of labor , albeit there’s still five elevators, the doors, which are the
biggest problem, they’ve been knocking those down pretty much .”

An F/A-18F Super Hornet, left, and an E/A-18G Growler, are positioned on one of Ford’s aircraft elevators to be lifted from the hangar bay to the flight deck, January 21, 2020.

Other issues still come to light. The last Nimitz-class carrier , USS George H.W.
Bush, and therefore the Ford were built with new toilet and sewage systems, like those on commercial
airliners but scaled up for a crew of 5,000.

consistent with a recent Government Accountability Office report, the Navy has found it must
“acid flush” those sewage systems “on a daily basis” to “address unexpected and frequent
clogging.”

Each acid flush costs about $400,000, and, the report says, “the Navy has yet to work out how
often and for a way many ships this action will got to be repeated.”

Modly said he didn’t have any details on the toilets but said he had “put an enormous spotlight” on the
new carrier and was “actually very happy with where the Ford is true now.”

“It’s made significant progress within the last six months,” Modly said, adding that with its recent
certifications, the Ford will soon be “the only ship that we've on the East Coast that basically is
qualified to try to to all of our carrier certifications” the remainder of the year.

“So it’s getting to be contributing to the mission and to the operation of the Navy starting within the
next few months,” Modly said.