USS Ford Plans New Aggressive Training Schedule At Sea

ABOARD THE USS GERALD R. FORD: Sailors aboard the nation’s newest, $13 billion aircraft carrier will pull back into port at Norfolk, Va. this week after conducting hundreds of takeoffs and landings and running the ship’s still-cranky weapons elevators through hundreds of lifts, a major demonstration that the new carrier class is making progress after large budget overruns and schedule delays.

As F-18s and C-2 Greyhounds took off and landed in a near-constant rush of engines and buzzing propellers on Monday, the ship’s skipper, Capt. J.J. Cummings told a small group of reporters in his office –designed to look like the former president’s home — that being at sea will be the new normal for the ship and its crew. 

“The ship is kickass,” Cummings said, extolling the new technologies that separate the ship from the current Nimitz-class carriers. “Innovation is centered right on this ship. We have the ability to power up future weapons systems and the ability to catch and recover aircraft that don’t exist yet.”

Originally scheduled to deploy in 2018, the Ford is unlikely to deploy much before 2024 thanks to multiple issues with its propulsion system, launching technology, radar system and weapons elevators. Many of those problems have been fixed, Navy officials say, but years of testing and refining the first-in-class new technologies are critical to making sure they work on the following three Ford-class carriers.

A milestone will come in March when the flight deck is certified, allowing the Ford to take on an unexpected new role for much of the next year: acting as the training platform of East Coast-based Navy pilots while other carriers are deployed or under repair, a readiness issue the Navy is struggling to overcome.

To fill that critical role, Ford will be at sea for as much of half of the next 18 months, an aggressive schedule that will see the ship head out for weeks at a time to test new technologies and train pilots, come home for another few weeks to download data and make any repairs and adjustments and then back to sea. 

When it comes to the infamous electromagnetic weapons elevators, a new technology installed without the usual workups and testing on shore, the ship appears to be making progress. As of right now, four of the 11 elevators work, with the fifth expected to come online in March.

The elevators are designed to lift 25,000 pounds of munitions at a rate of 150 feet per minute, as opposed to the current Nimitz-class elevators which move 10,500 pounds at 100 feet per minute. 

The elevators are staggered from deck to deck, each one specially configured for the area of the ship they occupy, meaning each has been specially designed and presents unique problems. Four serve only upper decks. Seven serve lower decks and it’s the lower lifts that have proven a more difficult problem. They have to pass through several decks with a number of hatches between them. As the elevator passes, the hatches seal to ensure water tightness. The lower elevators are still a work in progress, while the upper elevators are running through their tests without incident, sailors here told me.

The series of lifts will allow the crew to end the old, time-consuming practice of arming bombs in the ship’s mess hall and storing them on deck where they’re subject to the elements while waiting to be loaded on a fighter.

Instead, the “bomb farm” deep below deck will arm the bombs and send them up, arriving on deck right next to the warplane that needs them. That allows for faster, safer and more arming of planes and getting them into the air.

Cummings and Navy acquisition James Geurts, who spent the day aboard the ship checking in on progress, said previous issues with the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) have largely been ironed out, and launches and recoveries are coming off as they planned.

Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly is closely watching the ship and recently called together Navy officials and industry execs working on the program to ensure they are moving in the right direction.

“We can’t afford to have this ship as a poster child for what we can’t do right as a Navy,” Modly told me. “It’s too critical for our future as a Navy.”

Speaking at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments Wednesday, Modly said the carrier will remain the backbone of the Navy’s offensive punch in the decades to come, but the service will have to be willing to make some changes. “The big question at the top of that [modernization] list is the carrier. What’s the future carrier going to look like?” he said.

The Navy wants to move in the direction of conducting widely dispersed operations to make carrier strike groups a more difficult target, and it doesn’t give you that distribution that I think we want,” Modly said. 

The Navy and Marine Corps recently wrapped up a comprehensive force structure assessment, which Defense Secretary Mark Esper is expected to begin reviewing in the coming days. The assessment is meant to provide a roadmap for how the Navy might be able to achieve a 355-ship fleet in the coming decades, how it incorporates unmanned vessels into operations, and critically, where aircraft carriers fit into the service’s plans. 

It’s not clear when the report will be released — that’s partially depends on how happy Esper is with its conclusions — but with flat budgets expected in the coming years and big bills coming due with the new builds of Columbia-class submarines and three more Ford carriers, the Navy has its work cut out for them. But for the moment, the Ford will be out at sea, ironing out the bugs for the Navy’s newest carriers, whatever role they might play in the future.