Justin Meyer’s remarks at the event also underlined the benefits for the United States of the US Navy buying, building, and operating the carriers in ‘twos’.
“The demand for aircraft carriers has never been greater,”
“Recently, we’ve had both USS Carl Vinson and USS Ronald Reagan out West, as well as USS Gerald R Ford and USS Dwight D Eisenhower operating in ‘dual-carrier’ operations in the Eastern Mediterranean.”
Justin Meyer, Executive Director for the US Navy’s Program Executive Office
In the latter instance, Ford deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean and Eisenhower to the Northern Arabian Sea to provide deterrence presence as the Israel-Hamas crisis escalated.
Meyer said such operations demonstrated how carrier capability was being used to respond to navy and Combatant Commanders’ needs, as well as the world’s ever-changing security requirements. “Carriers are critical to that end,” he added.
Ford (CVN 78) is the first of a new class of carrier procured to replace the in-service Nimitz-class ships (including Vinson, Reagan, and Eisenhower). Ford was commissioned in 2017, and has been on operations since late 2022.
The next Ford-class carrier set to come off the production line is John F Kennedy. “She’s over 90 percent construction complete,” said Meyer. “We’ve turned over 2000 spaces, which is about 80 percent [of the ship’s spaces].” The carrier is undergoing combat systems testing currently, with 15 of the 19 planned combat systems turned over to date. Testing of the ship’s aircraft launch and recovery equipment – the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) – is scheduled to begin in Quarter Two 2024.
The ship’s radar fit is a new one, in the form of the Raytheon AN/SPY-6(V3)-based Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar active electronically-scanned array system. This radar capability is slated to be back-fitted onto in-service US Navy carriers, too: this can happen during Refuelling and Complex Overhaul (RCOH) work, said Meyer.
Specific lessons are already being learned early in the Ford-class construction, as demonstrated in Kennedy’s build. “The big thing we recently came through was revising our post-delivery strategy, and incorporating some of what was going to be a rather large post-shakedown availability (PSA) package in line,” said Meyer. Consequently, he continued, “When we deliver the ship, we deliver it as a ‘whole up round’ …. We don’t deliver the ship and then have a prolonged PSA period.” This means, Meyer explained, the carrier is delivered with core capabilities like its F-35 aircraft operations ‘ready to go’.
“Doing that was a big win, and we’re working that now,” said Meyer.
The next two Ford carriers off the production line are Enterprise (CVN 80) and Doris Miller (CVN 81), being procured under a ‘two-ship buy’. “We are executing the ‘two-ship strategy’, which is ‘design once, build twice’,” said Meyer.
Enterprise, laid down in August 2022, is now 35 percent complete, with over 20,000 tonnes assembled in dry dock. “At the keel laying … roughly a year-and-a-half ago, it was about 4,000 tonnes: so, over 20,000 tonnes [added] in a bit under a year-and-a-half,” Vice Admiral James Downey,Commander, Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), pointed out.
For Doris Miller, build work is 13 percent complete, with keel laying scheduled for 2026.Here, said Meyer, “The benefit of the ‘two-ship buy’ is being able to buy a lot of the material for 81 much earlier than we were able to do for 80, ensuring that sequence-critical material will be in place and meet the in-yard need dates.”
“While there’s been some schedule pressure on 80, what we’ve been doing is [looking at] what can we do differently to ensure we don’t have cascading impacts to 81 and beyond,” Meyer continued. “One of the things we recently did was an improvement to the dry dock at Newport News, adding another intermediate gate, which allows us to complete 80 while simultaneously building 81 …. So, not having a day-for-day slip and being able in essence to build two carriers at once.”
“There’s not too many places in the world where you could build two aircraft carriers in a dry dock,” Vice Adm Downey added.
In conclusion, said Meyer, the PEO has been “[taking] the innovative approach of questioning how we’ve always built aircraft carriers to ensure that we’re meeting the carrier mission, which is delivering aircraft carriers at affordable cost, on time, and ready for tasking.”
