By Geoff Fein
While it might appear that the Navy’s San Antonio-class program is fraught with problems, the Navy and industry team have been able to drastically reduce the number of inspection trial cards and put in place construction practices to cut down on installation work and on cost, according to a Navy official.
When the USS San Antonio (LPD-17) wrapped up her trials, the Navy’s Board of Inspection and Survey (InSurv) wrote up just over 16,000 trial cards, Capt. Bill Galinis, LPD-17 program manager, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
In April 2007, LPD-17 went into BAE Systems‘ repair facility in Norfolk, Va., to fix the problems found by the inspection.
The cost of Post Shakedown Authority (PSA) for the USS San Antonio was $36 million (Defense Daily, May 14, 2007).
When the USS New Orleans (LPD-18) finished her trials earlier this year, the InSurv board wrote up just under 14,000 trial cards, Galinis noted.
“When we delivered the ships, they were not quite finished,” he said of both the San Antonio and New Orleans.
“When we got to [LPD]-19, that’s where we saw the big down shift. We had a little bit more than a 50 percent reduction from hull two to hull three, and that was a step increase for us,” Galinis said. “Same thing on Part 1 cards, where you went from 740 cards to 257…better than a 50 percent decrease from the second to third ship.”
Part 1 cards note deficiencies that would affect a mission area of the ship, such as defensive systems, the ability to get underway and embark Marines, Galinis said.
Part 2 cards are material deficiencies that would not necessarily degrade a mission area, he added.
By the time the USS Mesa Verde (LPD-20) underwent her InSurv inspection, the amount of Part 1 cards decreased almost 90 percent, Galinis said.
“That’s a real credit to the builder and the Navy team that’s down there on site, where literally we go through and prepare a ship to go through the trial process,” Galinis said.
The first trial is conducted by the Navy’s Supervisor of Ships (SUPSHIP). Galinis said they take the InSurv reports from the previous inspections and start from there.
“As we go through the test sequence, we are looking at these deficiencies and making sure we are rolling those lessons in,” he said. “The shipyard has a process where they do that, and the SUPSHIP does that as well.”
But it’s difficult to roll in those lessons learned. That’s because two different yards are building the LPD-17 class: Northrop Grumman [NOC] Shipbuilding’s Pascagoula, Miss., facility and the company’s shipyard in New Orleans.
“Across the class, you don’t get true learning because we are building ships in alternate facilities,” Galinis said. “Although there is some part of the workforce that moves back and forth across the two shipyards.”
Another issue has been that the lessons learned from LPD-17 and -18 have been rolled into the follow-on ships out of sequence, Galinis said.
“On [LPD]-19 and -20, a lot of these lessons learned were cut in…out of sequence. In other words, if you had to plan how you do the work, some of the changes as a result of some of these earlier InSurv trials were rolled into these follow ships probably not at the optimum time, if you had an opportunity to really plan it out,” he said. “That’s because if you take a look at how the ships stack up on top of one another, they were just that close in the construction sequence.”
Not being able to cut that work in, in sequence, affects not only the number of changes that can be cut in but also what it cost to do that work, Galinis added.
That also affects the end cost of this ship in some cases because it takes more man hours to do that. Galinis said it is the three, two, one rule.
“What would take you an hour to do in a unit would take you two hours to do when you stack that on, and when the ship goes into the water that task would take you three hours to do,” he said. “So you can see as a ship gets closer to delivery it gets more expensive to do the same amount of work, because you close the ship down and are working in a much more confined space…and it’s more difficult to do the work.
“That’s why when I say we are cutting corrections in, out of sequence here, you don’t generally get as much learning and the same leverage,” Galinis added.
What people will start to see on the USS New York (LPD-21) and the follow ships, however, is that a lot of this work is being done in sequence, Galinis said. “So we are able to sort of [plan] that in, and certainly with [LPD-] 22 and follow-on you will see even more of that.”
The other thing the Navy and Northrop Grumman have been able to do on these ships is to increase the amount of pre-outfit on the units, Galinis said.
There are 210 units on a LPD-17-class ship. Those units are built in modules. What the Navy would like to try to do is get as much pre-outfitting done as they possibly can.
“By installing piping systems, equipment, some machinery units, ventilation, electrical components, things of that nature…on the earlier ships pre-outfitting has probably been in the 70 percent range. We are moving up into the 90 percent, or even better, on these later ships,” Galinis said. “Going back to that three-two-one rule, we are doing a lot more of that work on the front end of the construction process at a lower cost. As we start to stack those units, there is less installation work to do on the back end.
“The lessons learned in the items that were identified on the previous ships, that work is being done more efficiently, in sequence on [LPD-] 21 and follow, and we are also able, on [LPD-] 22 and follow, to pull that back further and include that as part of the pre-outfitting work that we do. We are increasing that amount of work as well.”