US Navy's top official says its new, first-in-class carrier is improving and sailors don't want to get off

• The new, first-in-class aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is decked out with new technology, but work on the ship has been waylaid by cost overruns and delays.
• Those issues have been a sore spot between lawmakers, the Navy, and the shipbuilder, but the last six months have seen marked progress, according to the service's top civilian official.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The US Navy's newest carrier, the first-in-class USS Gerald R. Ford, finished 2019 as the subject of a war of words between, Congress, the Navy's top civilian official, and the shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries.

In October, after criticism from lawmakers over the new carrier, then-Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said confidence in the company's senior leadership was "very, very low" and that it had "no idea" what it was doing.

The Ford has a suite of new technology, and its development has been plagued by cost overruns and delays - its delivery to the Navy in May 2017 was two years late - though work on it is progressing.

The Ford, now in the fifth month of its 18-month post-delivery test and trials period, finished aircraft compatibility testing at the end of January and certified its flight deck and carrier air-traffic control center on March 20.

Those events attest to progress on the ship's most important systems, but "the most telling" indicator is its sailors, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said this week. (Spencer was ousted in December over an unrelated matter.)

"To talk to the sailors on the ship and see how they feel about it, particularly the ones that have served on a Nimitz carrier before, they understand the difference. They recognize how much more advanced this carrier is, how much easier ... and safer it is for them to do their jobs," Modly said on a March 25 edition of the Defense and Aerospace Report podcast.

"Many of them told me they never want to go back to a Nimitz carrier after being on this one," Modly added, "and that's for a ship that's still sort of working through its shakedowns here. So I think that's a very telling sign, and generally I think you get to the ground truth when you talk to them."

'A disaster up until now'

The Ford is not out of the woods. The highest-profile problem now is its Advanced Weapons Elevators, which use electromagnetic motors to lift more weaponry faster than elevators on Nimitz-class carriers.

Four of the carrier's 11 elevators have been certified for use, and a fifth soon will be, Modly said. "The four that have been certified have had thousands and thousands of cycles on them with no problems - the fifth one, same thing."

Shipbuilders are looking to certify two more elevators this year and to finish the rest around this time next year, Modly added, echoing comments he made in January, when he said the elevators had been "a disaster up until now."

The problem isn't that the elevators are broken, Modly said on the podcast. "It's just they haven't been installed completely yet. They're still in the installation process, and that's just taking a lot longer than the shipyard thought it would take."

Once the elevators are installed the main challenge is the 70 doors and hatches through which they move between the lower deck, the main deck, and the flight deck.

"The doors and hatches have to seal completely or else the elevator won't proceed through the different various decks, and there's no way to override that," Modly said.

Of those 70 doors and hatches, "there's 20 of them that are left to be done," Modly said. "When you look at the volume of work, even though there's still five elevators, the doors, which are the biggest problem, they've been knocking those down pretty well."

Other issues continue to come to light. The last Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, USS George H.W. Bush, and the Ford were built with new toilet and sewage systems, like those on commercial airliners but scaled up for a crew of 5,000.

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, the Navy has found it needs to "acid flush" those sewage systems "on a regular basis" to "address unexpected and frequent clogging."

Each acid flush costs about $400,000, and, the report says, "the Navy has yet to determine how often and for how many ships this action will need to be repeated."

Modly said he didn't have any details on the toilets but said he had "put a big spotlight" on the new carrier and was "actually very pleased with where the Ford is right now."

"It's made significant progress in the last six months," Modly said, adding that with its recent certifications, the Ford will soon be "the only ship that we have on the East Coast that really is qualified to do all of our carrier certifications" the rest of the year.

"So it's going to be contributing to the mission and to the operation of the Navy starting in the next couple of months," Modly said.

'No indications' of the coronavirus on Ford

The Ford's achievements this month came as much of the Navy started to grapple with the spread of the coronavirus.

The first sailor tested positive for the virus on March 13. That sailor and several more who tested positive were assigned to ships in port in San Diego. The first deployed ship with a case was the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is now in Guam, where its 5,000 crew will remain aboard and be tested for the virus.

The TR visited Vietnam in early March, but the flights and personnel moving on and off the carrier make it hard to determine the origin of its outbreak.

The Ford has also been conducting flight operations and hosting visitors. The Navy's top officer, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday, said Tuesday that "a couple of hundred shipyard workers" were on the Ford during its recent certifications, working to keep it "at pace and on schedule" for deployment.

Newport News Shipbuilding is the only designer and builder of aircraft carriers for the Navy, and as of Wednesday, three of its employees had tested positive for the coronavirus, two of whom haven't been on company property since March 16.

"Newport News Shipbuilding employees temporarily assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) are required to follow any health protocols established by the ship," Duane Bourne, a spokesman for NNS, said in an email Friday.

Cmdr. Jennifer Cragg, public affairs officer for the Commander, Naval Air Force Atlantic, said Thursday that there had been "no indications" of the coronavirus among any crew or passengers aboard the Ford and because of that, "testing off of the ship has not been required for any previous or currently embarked personnel."

The Ford is complying with Defense Department guidance and only sails with mission-essential personnel who have also complied with required medical guidelines, Cragg said.

Aboard the Ford, the "crew is maintaining stringent cleanliness standards in support of the crew's health and maintaining overall mission readiness to continue carrier qualifications with fleet aviators," Cragg added.