Navy's Newest Carrier to Deploy in May, Program Official Says
By Richard R. Burgess, Senior Editor, and Ann Tropea, Editor-in-Chief
The Navy's newest aircraft carrier is set to make its first deployment in support of a regional combatant commander next month, the ship's program manager said.
The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) has, "fully transitioned to an in-service ship," said Captain Ryan Metcalf, program manager for new-construction aircraft carriers, speaking April 4 to an audience at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space Expo in National Harbor. "She now is finished. [The ship] last fall had a very successful deployment with several NATO allies."
The Ford last week completed its Composite Unit Training Exercise, a weeks-long "final graduation' before commencing a deployment with a carrier strike group.
"She earned all of her certifications and met all the requirements to deploy," Metcalf said. "She's destined to deploy the first week of May. I don't have the exact date, but in that timeframe, and we expect that to be at least a six-month deployment."
Last fall the Ford made what the Navy called a “service-retained” deployment, meaning it was operating by the authority of the chief of naval operations under command and control of the U.S. 2nd Fleet, rather than under the command and control of a regional combatant commander under the Global Force Management Concept.
Commissioning to Deployment Timeframes
The Ford is deploying next month almost six years after its commissioning in 2017.
"We drove the requirements to meet the mission, meet the capabilities, and take advantage of new technologies and innovations," Metcalf said of the long time to ready the ship for deployment.
With the second ship of the class, the future USS John F. Kennedy (CVN 79), "we changed the contract structure and to a fixed price contract," he said. "We introduced the new radar — the Enterprise Air surveillance Radar — and we updated the build strategy from the lessons we learned."
For the next two carriers, CVNs 80 and 81, "we bought the ships two at a time and the two ship contract allowed us to stabilize the industrial base and provide for long-term stability with the shipbuilder," he said. "We introduced digital shipbuilding. Integrated digital shipbuilding is basically the elimination of paper design products. You do not see shipyard employees carrying around large drawings or notebooks with notes or anything. They're carrying around tablets and laptops where they have access to design instructions, drawings, building materials, and their supervisors' tools where they can update the progress almost real time."
Metcalf said the John F Kennedy, "is nearly 90% complete. Today, there are over 11 million feet of cable being pulled on the ship, and over 1500 or about 60% of the compartments on the ship have actually been turned over to the crew."
He said the ship's power plant and electrical system testing is ongoing, and testing of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and lighting off of individual combat systems has begun.
Metcalf clarified the planned 2025 delivery time frame, a change from the 2024 date.
"The original plan was to deliver [CVN] 79 like [CVN] 78," he said. "We would have planned a long post-delivery timeline. We have lots of lessons learned from [CVN] 78 with 5000 sailors on board and the airwing. They provided all the operational experience and lessons learned and we had a long list of post-construction post-delivery modifications to improve capability, instead of delivering the ship and working through a very long post-shakedown availability time period.
"Since we had done almost all of that work on 78 already, we understood it," he said. "What that means is John F. Kennedy will deliver much more like [CVNs] 80 and 81 and less like 78. We're able to maintain the deployment timeline for the ship. She will still deploy on time because we won't have the long post-delivery timeline that we originally planned for by inserting that work before delivery. So, we're basically just rearranging some of the dates between now and the operational deployment and re-sequencing the delivery of work that was planned two years out."
"There are no shortcuts to aircraft carrier construction," he said. "These are large, complex naval vessels and we are not going to deliver them in half the time. We take our time and get it right and will deliver the machine that the Navy needs."
Metcalf said that CVN 80 — the future USS Enterprise — is more than 25% complete, with the hull now more than 550 feet long. CVN 81 — the future USS Doris Miller — is in the material procurement and initial construction stage, with delivery planned for 2032.
He stressed that CVN 81 is showing the advantages of a two-carrier procurement even more than the Navy anticipated.
"For this ship that delivers in 2032, over 70% of the purchase orders from Newport News [Shipbuilding] are in place already," he said, noting that was almost a 50% increase from where it would be if it was a single ship procurement.
"Over the course of the last three years, that stability and that cash flow and that dependability has probably saved us an estimate of millions of dollars, with the inflation and labor shortages and supply chain problems," Metcalf said.
The Gerald R. Ford has more than 14,000 catapult launches and arrested landings to date. The crew is collecting data on the ship's sortie rate, which will be measured in an exercise scheduled for after the upcoming deployment.
