When I made my last career move to the Newport News areas back in late ’09, actual construction on the Ford was just beginning.
\n12+ years later………….<\/p>\n
Six Years Late And $2.8 Billion Over Budget Navy\u2019s Costly Carrier Is Ready For Training And Operations<\/a><\/p>\n The Navy\u2019s costliest warship\u00a0finally has all the elevators<\/a>\u00a0needed to lift bombs from below its deck so it can deploy on its first operational patrol \u2014 more than four and a half years after delivery.<\/p>\n The service has announced that the 11th and final Advanced Weapons Elevator is in place on the $13.3 billion USS Gerald R. Ford and the aircraft carrier is ready for training and operations.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a significant milestone for the Navy, ship and her crew,\u201d Rear Admiral James Downey, the Navy\u2019s program executive officer for aircraft carriers, said in a statement. \u00a0\u201cWe now have the entire system to operate and train with.\u201d He said the service and the prime contractor, Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc., used \u201chundreds of craftsmen, technicians and engineers, working around the clock \u2013through multiple underway and holiday periods \u2014 to get these advanced systems on line and operational.\u201d<\/p>\n The Navy took delivery of the first in the Ford class of carriers in May 2017<\/a>, praising the \u201cnewest, most capable, most advanced warship\u201d and saying it was \u201cexpected to be operational in 2020.\u201d The service didn\u2019t disclose that none of the 11 elevators were operational, much less installed, until Bloomberg News reported the problem in November 2018.<\/p>\n \u201cI recognize the extraordinary effort that it has taken to finish all 11 of these elevators, but this effort should not have been necessary,\u201d Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the most vocal congressional critic of the Navy on the issue, said in a statement.<\/p>\n The carrier ultimately was delivered \u201csix years late and $2.8 billion over budget,\u201d Inhofe said.<\/p>\n The delay to fix the elevators and resolve other issues \u201chas lengthened a period during which the Navy is attempting to maintain policy maker-desired levels of carrier forward deployments with its 10 other carriers,\u201d the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a report this month.<\/p>\n Inhofe put it more bluntly. He said the delay has forced other ships and crews to deploy \u201clonger and more often,\u201d as well as causing gaps in the Navy\u2019s global \u201cpresence when no carrier could deploy, at a time when naval presence and capability could not be more critical for our national security.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the only positive outcome of the weapons elevator delays is \u201cdevelopment of what the Navy and the shipyard should have had from the very beginning \u2014 a Ford-class plan for the development, building, installation and operational training\u201d that\u2019s now needed to avoid such mistakes on the second ship in the four-vessel class, the USS John F. Kennedy, said Mike Fabey, author of \u201cHeavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America\u2019s Supercarriers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I made my last career move to the Newport News areas back in late ’09, actual construction on the Ford was just beginning. 12+ years later…………. Six Years Late And $2.8 Billion Over Budget Navy\u2019s Costly Carrier Is Ready For Training And Operations The Navy\u2019s costliest warship\u00a0finally has all the elevators\u00a0needed to lift bombs … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goobermint","category-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75749"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75750,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75749\/revisions\/75750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}