Aircraft Carriers III

Boeing is confident it can win the Navy’s

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. In fact, it’s so bullish that it may already be on a path to building a second prototype.

During a March 6 visit to St. Louis, Defense News got to be the first media outlet to see the company’s MQ-25 offering up close and personal.

Asked if Boeing Phantom Works was working on a second MQ-25 prototype after having revealed the first one in December, its program director Don “BD” Gaddis and capture lead Dave Thieman laughed and pointedly steered the conversation in a different direction.

But another source indicated that another MQ-25 prototype could be revealed in short order.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Boeing has poured its investment dollars into creating not only one, but two test versions of an aircraft while a competition still rages on. In 2016, the company

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in a glitzy ceremony, and then 15 minutes later took reporters to a nearby hanger to reveal a second aircraft going through tests.

If a second Boeing MQ-25 exists, it’s evidence of how badly the company wants to win the competition, which has been narrowed down to three vendors — Boeing, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin — after

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.

“This is a high-priority program,” said Phil Finnegan, a unmanned system analyst at the Teal Group. “They’re really intent on strengthening their position in unmanned systems.”

Boeing has poured its own money into maturing its carrier-based drone concept and is the first of the three vendors to make its MQ-25 air vehicle public.

Its Phantom Works division conducted the initial design review for what became its MQ-25 prototype in October 2012, back when the U.S. Navy was still pursuing an unmanned aircraft that could fly on and off the carrier to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance as well as strike missions, under a program called Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike, or UCLASS, Gaddis said.

The company quietly rolled out the prototype within the company in November 2014, just a month before the Navy announced it was pausing the UCLASS program.

“You can imagine how upset we were,” laughed Thieman.

Then, in 2016, the Navy killed UCLASS and began a new carrier drone program called Carrier-Based Aerial-Refueling System, or CBARS, which later became the MQ-25. Instead of an ISR and strike mission, the MQ-25 would act as an autonomous, unmanned tanker and relieve F/A-18E/F Super Hornets from refueling duties that take away from the fighters’ core mission set.

But Boeing found that its UCLASS design was already a good fit for the tanking mission. Unlike Northrop, which invested heavily in a stealthy, flying-wing design aimed at a precision-strike mission, Boeing opted for a wing-body-tail air vehicle with limited low-observable features and a large payload bay.

“One of the things that people should be reminded of is that in UCLASS, tanking was one of the missions for UCLASS, and the company designed the airplane around that mission area as well as all of the other UCLASS mission areas,” Gaddis said. “So the other UCLASS missions are gone, but the tanking still remains, and we feel that this aircraft is right in the wheelhouse of that tanking requirement.”

Externally, Boeing’s MQ-25 prototype, also known as T1, is still the same as its UCLASS design. However, the company had to do significant rework on the mission systems side as the requirement shifted from surveillance to refueling.

“There will be some touches in the airplanes between T1 and [the first engineering and manufacturing development, or EMD, aircraft], but not many. The biggest change are in the mission systems,” Gaddis said. “The UCLASS requirements are quite different than the MQ-25 requirements for mission systems. And so when you go from big ISR to little ISR, that’s really the biggest change for MQ-25.”

Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security, said Boeing’s prototype shows its UCLASS origins, with a large, robust fuselage “boat” that could carry fuel or — as originally developed — advanced sensor systems and ordnance.

“One area of concern, however, is the thin wing design, which is clearly influenced by the previous high-altitude ISR mission,” he said.

“I would expect, as the MQ-25 mission tanker program goes forward, that this prototype would evolve the wings to make them wider from their front leading edge to back and also thicker. This would make the platform more robust for sustained tanking missions as well as add additional fuel capacity to the design.”

As

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has noted, Boeing’s design features a flush dorsal jet intake that supplies air to the engine, which as of yet has not been specified by the company. According to Gaddis, the company’s MQ-25 stores its fuel in tanks surrounding the engine, and the inner section of its fold-up wings are “wet,” meaning the fuel moves freely within that part of the wing.

According to the Navy’s requirements, the MQ-25 must be able to deliver 14,000 pounds of fuel at distances of 500 nautical miles from an aircraft carrier.

Gaddis said Boeing’s design meets that requirement with margin to spare, telling Defense News that it “carries a ton of gas.” But with a competition still ongoing, he declined to detail exactly how much the air vehicle can carry.

The Navy will decide the MQ-25 competition in August, choosing a single vendor and awarding a contract for the four EMD aircraft, with an option for three more test assets.

In its fiscal 2019 budget request, the Navy announced that it would begin production in FY23 with a procurement of four drones, ahead of an initial operational capability in FY26. It plans to buy 72 aircraft over the course of the program.

Boeing should be ready for the first flight of its MQ-25 shortly after the Navy makes its downselect decision in August, but it still has a lot of work to do before then, Gaddis said.

Besides moving its prototype through the standard testing process that all aircraft go through before first flight, it also needs to finish its statement of work. Boeing — like the other competitors — was awarded a contract to refine its MQ-25 concept, which includes activities such as software integration and improving its open-systems architecture.

It also includes providing data about how to handle the drone aboard the deck of an aircraft carrier, which Boeing is demonstrating through a series of drills in St. Louis, Missouri. The company mapped out the deck of an aircraft carrier on the tarmac at Lambert Field, and Boeing employees have practiced how to safely and efficiently move its MQ-25 around the ship by taxiing it around, tested the arresting gear and hooking it into a catapult.

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Published on Mar 16, 2018

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The Navy today moved towards signing the first two-carrier contract since the Reagan Administration, asking builder Newport News Shipbuilding for additional data on the cost-savings potential for buying CVNs 80 and 81 together.

The service released a request for proposal to the company this afternoon, with the hopes of receiving the necessary cost and schedule predictions by late summer or early fall and potentially reaching a two-carrier agreement with Newport News Shipbuilding by the end of the calendar year.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition James Geurts told reporters today that it is still unclear what the final product would be after today’s RFP — whether it would be a construction contract for two aircraft carriers, or some other means of allowing for the Navy and its prime contractor to buy two ship-sets of materials at a time.

“If you’re building two of these, your return on investment and the sharing between the government and industry to drive towards affordability, I think, there’s a much better return on investment,” he said.
For example, “instead of buying one set of parts we buy two sets of parts.”

Geurts said the main goal is cost-reduction — though a reduction in man-hours it takes to build the yet-unnamed CVN-81 would likely be reduced as a byproduct of the two-carrier buy, and that ship could deliver as much as a year early, based on data the Navy already reviewed.

The Navy would need some additional authorities from Congress — chiefly, incremental funding authority for both aircraft carriers — which Geurts said could be worked out this spring and summer during the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act negotiations and put in place by the end of the year, to align with a planned handshake agreement with Newport News Shipbuilding by the end of the year.

Though Geurts couldn’t say exactly how much the Navy might save in this shipbuilding strategy, he said there were “significant affordability opportunities … worth looking at.”

“I would surmise the industry partners are probably, when they work with suppliers, looking for option buys. So they’re likely looking at ways they can contract to order one with an option for a second set of kits,” Geurts said.
“And then, of course, we’re going to look at what are all the industry investment in terms of things they’re going to do to the shipyard, going to a more digital approach – all that will be occurring in parallel. So I see savings coming from multiple different areas: one will be reduction in labor, one will be more efficient suppliers that can build in a bulk quantity, and then third is we’ll have a very similar design for both so we can really improve the learning as we continue to build more carriers.”

The Navy has eyed a two-carrier buy for years now but has grappled with how to implement that, given that the service is buying carriers five years apart. Public talks about the logistics of buying CVNs 80 and 81 together began in earnest in the spring of 2016, but Geurts told the House Armed Services Committee earlier this month that cost analysis was still taking place.

Geurts told lawmakers that previous two-carrier buys in the Nimitz-class achieved about 10-percent savings, but he noted the Navy is already halfway through buying material for CVN-80 so there could be a smaller savings potential in the CVN-80/81 buy. Pressed for a numerical answer, Geurts suggested the Navy could save somewhere between $1 billion and $2.5 billion on the deal.

Naval Sea Systems Command commander

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that an 80/81 two-carrier buy wouldn’t help CVN-80, the future Enterprise, deliver any sooner, but it would allow CVN-81 to deliver faster and at a lower cost.

“The facts are pretty clear: when we’ve had a chance to do two-ship buys on the carrier side, with CVN-72 and 73 and then again with 74 and 75, in terms of the total cost performance of the ships and the number of man-hours it took to build those ships, within the Nimitz-class those four ships were built for the fewest man-hours and the lowest cost. So you’re clearly getting benefit out of that, but you have to balance it against the other competing needs of the budget,” Moore told USNI News in the December interview.

Importantly, those two two-carrier buys involved buying the carriers much closer together. In each block buy, the two carriers were centered about two and a half years apart, whereas CVN 80 and 81 are planned to be five years apart but could shift closer to four years apart.

Industry is also very interested in the idea of a two-carrier buy, as well as shortening the centers between carrier production.

“The closer the ships are – and there’s kind of a sweet spot at about three years; with the industrial base it’s probably more like three-and-a-half years to four years – but the closer the centers, the greater the labor efficiency because my workforce doesn’t have to build up to build one carrier and then go down and wait and go back up, build a second carrier and go down,”

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.
“We also have a tremendous amount of data from Nimitz class and also from submarines that if we buy bulk, if we go to the supply base and get two ship sets as opposed to one ship set, in aggregate that offers about a 10-percent opportunity to reduce cost on material.”

Boykin said today’s current carrier build rate of one every five years will never allow the Navy to reach its goal of having 12 carriers, “and worse than that, we run the risk of going below 10.” For both reasons – cost efficiency and reaching a 12-carrier fleet – Boykin said the company is strongly advocating building carriers every four years.


The Navy’s full statement:

The Navy released a CVN 80/81 two-ship buy Request for Proposal (RFP) to Huntington Ingalls Industries – Newport News Shipbuilding (HII-NNS) to further define the cost savings achievable with a two ship buy. With lethality and affordability a top priority, the Navy has been working with HII-NNS over the last several months to estimate the total savings associated with procuring CVN 80/81 as a two-ship buy.

“In keeping with the National Defense Strategy, the Navy developed an acquisition strategy to combine the CVN 80 and CVN 81 procurements to better achieve the Department’s objectives of building a more lethal force with greater performance and affordability,” said James F. Geurts, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Research Development and Acquisition. “This opportunity for a two-ship contract is dependent on significant savings that the shipbuilding industry and government must demonstrate. The Navy is requesting a proposal from HII-NNS in order to evaluate whether we can achieve significant savings.”

The two-ship buy is a contracting strategy the Navy has effectively used in the 1980s to procure NIMITZ-Class aircraft carriers and achieved significant acquisition cost savings compared to contracting for the ships individually. While the CVN 80/81 two-ship buy negotiations transpire, the Navy is pursuing contracting actions necessary to continue CVN 80 fabrication in Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 and preserve the current schedule. Navy plans to award the CVN 80 construction contract in early FY 2019 as a two-ship buy pending Congressional approval and achieving significant savings.

ENTERPRISE (CVN 80) is the third ship of the FORD-Class and the numerical replacement for the USS EISENHOWER (CVN 69). CVN 81, not yet named, will be the fourth ship of the class and will be the numerical replacement for the USS CARL VINSON (CVN 70). CVN 80 began advanced planning and initial long lead time material procurement in May 2016.

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Jura said:

I refrain from commenting on what I now read which is Navy, Newport News Taking Steps Towards Two-Carrier Buy

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180317-N-FK070-0120 ATLANTIC OCEAN (March 17, 2018) Finnish Air Force Capt. Juha Jarvinen lands an F/A-18C Hornet assigned to the Sharpshooters of Marine Strike Fighter Training Squadron (VMFAT) 101 on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72). This marks the first time a Finnish pilot has performed an arrested landing aboard an aircraft carrier. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Brian M. Wilbur/Released)

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Jura said:

LOL this is unheard of:

First For Finland: Lincoln Welcomes Partner Nation Pilot

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Jura said:

yeah and I still think F-35 on the Izumos/Hyugas is FANBOISH BUNK
May 15, 2015

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Japan's main governing Liberal Democratic Party plans to propose introducing F-35B fighter jets and a multi-purpose aircraft carrier to be operated under the country's defense-only stance.

The government is to review the National Defense Program Guidelines this year for the first time in 5 years.

On Tuesday, the LDP panel on national security compiled a set of proposals to be considered.

The panel stressed the need to enhance Japan's defense capabilities both in quality and quantity. It said North Korea's nuclear and missile development and China's military buildup and growing maritime presence are creating a security crisis.

The panel will call for procuring a multi-purpose aircraft carrier that can also serve as a hospital ship. It will be operated solely for defense purposes. Retrofitting of the Maritime Self-Defense Force's destroyer Izumo is to be listed as an option.

The panel also wants the Defense Ministry to acquire advanced F-35B stealth planes, which can take off from short runways.

Panel chair Gen Nakatani suggested Japan must become able to hit back at enemy bases.

The LDP plans to submit the proposals to the government for discussion in late May.

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Janiz said:

How fast you can expect Izumo class carriers turned into 'Cavour's? I would say that the earliest date would be 2022/23. We'll just have to wait for the next 5-year plan and see if it's there in any form.

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Jura said:

...

maybe it's better to leave it, for me, you know, seeing is believing
lifting one copy at a realistic sea state should be a good start LOL May 15, 2015

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