Aircraft Carriers III

bd popeye said:

FORBIN, how old are those photos? Do you know where they were taken? Thanks!

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Jura said:

"The Navy continued to work on its new class of aircraft carriers, pushing through ongoing delays on the first-in-class Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) that was supposed to commission this year. The Navy discovered in 2015 that its

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, one of three major technological advances in this new class, needed to be redesigned.

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with the proposed solution at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, and in October Commander of Naval Sea Systems Command Vice Adm. Tom Moore told reporters the tests were going well. The Navy and Newport News Shipbuilding

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, but the ship will not be ready to deliver and commission to the Navy until the AAG problems are worked out.

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, from March to the summer to September to November, the Navy has now declined to estimate when the ship might be ready for delivery. The service also said it

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, opting instead for something closer to the proven Mk 7 MOD 3 hydraulic arresting system in the Nimitz-class carriers."
is a part of Top Stories 2016: U.S. Navy Acquisition

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The U.S. Navy says it will stick with an advanced fighter jet landing system for its new aircraft carriers, despite some initial problems.

The Navy said in a press release Monday that glitches in the technology are being worked out. Benefits of the new landing gear include more reliability and less maintenance.

The landing gear problems have helped delay delivery of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the first of the Navy's new class of aircraft carriers. Construction was supposed to finish by September 2015. And the $12.9 billion ship was initially supposed to cost $10.5 billion.

Sea trials for the Ford are now set to begin in March. The Navy said the Ford will be ready to trap its first F/A-18 Super Hornet later this year.

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The Navy is electing to use the controversial Advanced Arresting Gear on its next Gerald R. Ford-class carrier, John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), USNI News has learned.

Earlier this month, the Navy’s chief weapons buyer notified Congress it was set to install the General Atomics-built AAG on JFK following an evaluation between the AAG and the legacy Mk-7 MOD3 hydraulic arresting system found on the Nimitz-class carriers.

In the last half of 2016, the future of the AAG on carriers beyond Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) was in doubt and drew scrutiny from the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Office of the Secretary of Defense as part of a larger look of the Ford program.

For its part, the Navy stood up a review board to evaluate use of the system past Ford.

The board – which included Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson and the Navy’s head of research – reported back to the House and Senate defense committees that reverting to the Mk-7 arresting gear would be cost-prohibitive and result in disruption to construction of future carriers.

In 2015, Naval Sea Systems Command said a design flaw in the AAG’s water twister — a complex paddle wheel that is designed to absorb 70 percent of the force of an airplane’s tailhook landing against an arresting wire, which brings the airplane to a stop. In November, the head of NAVSEA commander Vice Adm. Tom Moore, said the testing program for the AAG had shown marked improvements.

“When that ship delivers we’ll be ready to land aircraft on AAG. I think (CVN) 78 is doing much better, and I think we’ll have a fully functional system,” Moore said.
“I don’t want to presuppose any decision, but I believe if the system functions the way it does on 78 — and given where we are on CVN-79 and the construction of the ship — that it’s a very strong and viable path forward for us.”

Still, testing for the system on the ground — slated to be completed two years earlier — had to occur even as Ford was wrapping up pre-delivery testing. The failures in AAG development — in part — was responsible for several delays in delivery of Ford.

In a Monday statement, NAVAIR lauded progress of the program.

“AAG works,” said Capt. Steve Tedford, Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment (PMA 251) program manager, whose team manages the recovery system program said in a statement.
“The progress of AAG testing this past year has been significant and has demonstrated the system’s ability to meet Navy requirements. The team overcame many challenges to get the system to this point and ensure its readiness to support CVN 78 and future Ford-class ships.”

In a

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, the SASC laid out a pattern of cost increases from about a $476 million in costs for research development and acquisition in 2009 for four systems to a 2016 cost estimate of $1.4 billion – about a 130 percent increase when adjusted for inflation.

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A controversial arresting gear system that has suffered delays and spurred congressional inquiries will remain the technology of choice for the

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‘s next aircraft carrier, officials with Naval Air Systems Command announced Monday.

Citing continued progress in the test program for the Advanced Arresting Gear developed by General Atomics, officials announced in a release that the system would remain the recovery system of choice aboard the future carrier John F. Kennedy, set to be commissioned in 2020. The Kennedy is the second in a new class of carriers, with the first, the

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, expected to be delivered to the Navy in April.

“AAG works,”

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, Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment program manager and head of the team managing the AAG development program, said in a statement. “The progress of AAG testing this past year has been significant and has demonstrated the system’s ability to meet Navy requirements. The team overcame many challenges to get the system to this point and ensure its readiness to support CVN 78 and future Ford-class ships.”

NAVAIR officials said the decision to continue with AAG was the result of a thorough program review conducted in November, with leadership from Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson and Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Sean Stackley. The board, according to the release, also considered the possibility of returning to the legacy Mk-7 landing system in use by carriers today.

Last July, the Defense Department Inspector General released an audit finding that the new recovery system had blown past cost as schedule baselines due to ineffective program management and expensive midstream redesigns.

“Ten years after the program entered the engineering and manufacturing development phase, the Navy has not been able to prove the capability or safety of the system to a level that would permit actual testing of the system on an aircraft carrier because of hardware failures and software challenges,” the authors of the report wrote.

“This occurred because the Navy pursued a technological solution for its Ford-class carriers that was not sufficiently mature for the planned use, resulting in hardware failures to mechanical and electrical components and software modifications to accommodate those failures,” they wrote.

Speaking to reporters earlier this month, outgoing Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the problems arose from an overeagerness to equip the first of the new Ford class of supercarriers with the latest technology under development.

“New technology got pushed onto the [U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford] much faster than it should have been. That was a decision made by Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld in 2002. All this new technology was put on three different successive carriers, and it was all unproven,” Mabus said. “It’s going to be ready for the Ford to go into the fleet and to deploy, and it will be effective. But it took a long time, because it was brand-new technology, and it shouldn’t have all been put on that first ship.”

Navy officials said the decision to move forward with AAG came on the heels of the 350th recovery of an

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in December using the new system. Other milestones for testing include the completion of more than 1,400 dead-load arrestments and 351 test arrestments with the Super Hornet, and ongoing commissioning testing aboard the Ford, according to the announcement.

“There is much left to be done to qualify the entire air wing for deployed operations,” Rear Adm. Mike Moran, Program Executive Officer for Tactical Aircraft Programs, said in a statement, “but this team is on the right track and focused on delivering the performance the Navy requires.”

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“New technology got pushed onto the [U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford] much faster than it should have been. That was a decision made by Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld in 2002. All this new technology was put on three different successive carriers, and it was all unproven,” Mabus said.

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test bd said:

.. and what was wrong with the old arresting gear? Nuthin'..not a thing...

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• Operational capability to recover projected air wing, with renewed service life margins
• Full compatibility with Nimitz-class and Ford-class carriers
• Higher availability
• Self-diagnosis and maintenance alerts
• Reduced manning and total ownership cost

Jura said:

... passed by the Strait of Gibraltar today:

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Jura said:

Friday at 9:13 PM
in the Channel as I write:

(the tug in the middle of it, in the tiny dotted box in the above map)

averaging something like, I said something like, 13 knots

EDIT

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Jura said:

LOL I'll play General Atomic salesman now:

The AAG system offers significant benefits over current recovery systems, including:

• Operational capability to recover projected air wing, with renewed service life margins
• Full compatibility with Nimitz-class and Ford-class carriers
• Higher availability
• Self-diagnosis and maintenance alerts
• Reduced manning and total ownership cost

here's the brochure

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sooo coool, check it NOW

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Jura said:

LOL I'll play General Atomic salesman now:
...

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bd popeye said:

I would have not bought it. Trust me.. the old A-gear worked just fine..for many decades.

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