Navy officials confirmed on Thursday that the target date for the inaugural deployment of the first Ford-class carrier has been pushed off two years from 2019 to 2021 as a result of shock trials.
Shock tests for USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) are scheduled for 2019, said Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, program executive officer for carriers. While it typically takes only four months to set up, execute and recover from a shock test–which evaluates the ship’s ability to withstand combat by analyzing the performance of critical systems after an underwater explosion is set off nearby–the Navy believes it will be more prudent for the Ford to head straight into its first maintenance availability scheduled for 2020.
“Our experience is—first ship in the class, 29 independent steaming events, a lot of underway time—the best thing to do is to put the ship into its maintenance availability, bring it out, turn it over to the operators, do the normal training cycle and then deploy in 2021,” he said after a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the ship.
In practice, the actual deployment date will likely change as a result of training and maintenance requirements as well as combatant commander needs in theater, said Rear Adm. Michael Manazir, the Navy’s director of air warfare.
“If you don’t change any other assumption standing here today on the 1st of October, 2015,” the ship will deploy in 2021, he said. “That is never the case,” and the ship could deploy earlier or later than that date.
The Navy initially balked at conducting shock trials on CVN-78 despite pressure from Congress to do so. A mandate in SASC’s 2016 defense authorization bill–which was preserved in the recently released conference report–instructed the service to conduct shock trials on the Ford instead of on the follow-on ship USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79). In August, Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall in August sent a memo directing the Navy to do just that.
During the hearing, officials from the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon’s independent testing office said they were concerned that the lack of maturity of shipboard systems, such as the Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) and Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), could make the Ford’s testing and deployment schedule slip to the right.
“CVN-78 is unlikely to achieve promised aircraft launch and recovery rates as key systems are unreliable. The ship must complete its final, more complex construction phase concurrent with key test events,” Paul Francis, GAO’s managing director for acquisition and sourcing management, said in a report on the program released Thursday. “While problems are likely to be encountered, there is no margin for the unexpected. Additional costs are likely.”
Michael Gilmore, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, noted in his written testimony that developing the AAG’s aircraft recovery bulletins pose a schedule risk for the program. The bulletins outline the standard operating procedures to use the AAG with a specific aircraft, and an aircraft cannot undergo normal flight operations on the ship until its bulletin is complete.
When the Ford is delivered to the Navy in 2016, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet will be the only plane with a completed bulletin. That won’t affect shipboard testing, said Moore.
“What I need from the shipbuilding side of the house is I need to be able to take the ship out and exercise the flight deck, exercise EMALS and AAG and have a trained crew start to move aircraft around the flight deck,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me how different types, models, series. I just need planes launching and recovering during the six-month period between delivery and before I take it down for post shakedown availability.”
The Navy plans to have aircraft bulletins for the entire airwing–including the Super Hornet, F/A-18 Hornet, E-2 Hawkeye and C-2 Greyhound–completed before handing the ship over to Gilmore for operational testing, said Rear Adm. Donald Gaddis, the Navy’s program executive officer for tactical aircraft. “We have margin to do this.”
The first AAG test using live aircraft is scheduled for February, he said.
Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] Newport News Shipbuilding constructs the Ford-class. General Atomics developed EMALS and AAG.