Ford Class Aircraft Carriers - The Truth About What $13 Billion Gets You

most people knew little to nothing about the uss gerald r ford cvn 78 until president trump visited the ship in march of 2017. here's a picture of him touring the carrier i like this picture because in it our two naval academy classmates of mine the chief of naval operations at the time john richardson and the ceo of huntington ingalls mike petters so after this visit the president put out some words that the navy very much liked which is he sees the value of carrier power in terms of our global presence and he wants us to have at least 12 aircraft carriers going forward that is great in terms of the navy's approach to the program of record and defense budgets in the out years but at some point one of the crew members got his ear somebody who is involved in the electromagnetic aircraft launching system emails this system uses electric impulses to a core magnet instead of steam to power the catapults it's a generational shift in technology to launch airplanes off an aircraft carrier but this crew member said that it wasn't working and he wished that they would stick with steam so the the president glommed on to that narrative so just over two years after that initial visit to ford president trump was aboard the uss wasp in the western pacific where he gave these remarks let me ask you a question catapult right the catapult system do you like electric or steam [Music] steam who said electric there's one guy back okay i really need this information because you know we're building carriers we're building one they're using an electric catapult and an electric elevator number one i can't imagine in the case of battle it must be very delicate okay and you know steam's only worked for about 65 years perfectly and i won't tell you this because it's before my time by a little bit but they have a 900 million dollar cost overrun on this crazy electric catapult i said what was wrong with steam i would like to know all of the folks that know exactly what i'm talking about the catabol system steam or electric ready steam electric [Applause] [Music] he works for the enemy he's all right well you you might be in danger i better beat you no we want to go with him you know they're always coming up with new ideas they're making planes so complex you can't fly them you know that no it's i mean they want to show next next next and we all want innovation but it's too much but there's never been anything like the steam catapults and i went to the gerald ford which is under construction now for a long time they're having a problem with their electric catapult and i was talking to the catapult people and they said steam in the meantime we're spending all that money on electric and nobody knows what it's going to be like in bad conditions you understand so i think i'm going to put an order when we build a new aircraft carrier we're going to use steam i'm going to just put out an order we're going to use steam we don't need we don't need that extra speed you know they were saying one of the folks said no the the electric works faster but sir we can only get the plane there every couple of minutes so really what they did was wrong and we make mistakes but generally speaking we get it right but when we make them we have to corrupt them so we're going to put out an order we want to use steam so fast forward from the remarks that the president made aboard wasp in may of 2019 to thanksgiving of 2019 and the president is making some phone calls to military leaders around the globe including captain pat hanafan who is the ceo of uss ronald reagan listen to this conversation from the u.s navy we have the commanding officer captain pat hanafin and pat are you on the phone yes sir i'm with you and uh from the over 4 800 sailors and airmen aboard uss ronald reagan uh nation's only permanently forward deployed air uh aircraft carrier um we are currently in victoria harbor hong kong about 13 hours ahead of you still thanksgiving here and from all the sailors on board reagan uh serving peace through strength for america in the indo-pacific we wish you a happy thanksgiving well that's great pat i appreciate it very much and say hello to everybody and happy thanksgiving to you so the condition of the ship is a1 alpha 1 sir absolutely okay very important so you know we have another big one the gerald ford is going to be joining you pretty soon how does this compare in size and scope with the gerald ford you know all about that that's the new one right yes sir size and scope a good friend of mine just left command of that but uh size and scope about the same um certainly some improvements uh there to the uh to the plants and a few of the uh and the radars and even the uh the catapults uh and gear are slightly different as well but we'll push our tell me about the catapult system so on the gerald ford they don't use steam which is the first one that i've ever heard of that doesn't use steam and i know they have some difficulties which i'm not happy about and they spent a lot of money and i was just curious uh the the steam system is tried and true for many many years as long as we've had aircraft carriers how do you find steam versus what they're doing on the gerald ford which is electronic and digital if you can believe it yes sir our all of our nimitz uh super carriers have been using steam for uh for decades and we find it pretty reliable however the electromagnetic catapults that they're running there offer some great benefits to obviously like any new piece you got to work through the bugs but they offer some benefits uh not only the stress and strain on the aircraft to extend service life and other pieces um i have no doubt we'll work through that just as we work through all of our other advancements and continue to bring it to the to the enemy when called to do so so when you do the new carriers as we do and as we're thinking about doing would you go with steam or would you go with electromagnetic because steam is very reliable and the electromagnetic i mean unfortunately you have to be albert einstein to really work it properly what would you do yes sir you sort of have to be albert einstein to run the nuclear power plants that we have here as well but we're doing that uh very well the um the i would go sir mr president i would go uh electromagnetic cats i think that's the way okay we do pay a heavy cost for uh transiting the steam around the ship good okay i like to hear that i'm actually happy about that answer because at least you know they're doing what they're doing but that's actually a very good answer an article in the atlantic about this time framed it pretty well so let me read this to you it's not that emails has been a smashing success cost and schedule overruns have given the navy carrier project a reputation for being quote one of the most spectacular acquisition debacles in recent memory end quote as senator john mccain the arizona republican put it in 2015. the construction of three ford class aircraft carriers has swelled from 27 billion to 36 billion in the last 10 years but the problems with the ford class carrier program are more organizational than technological a common theme among infrastructural mega projects mccain blamed the vast bureaucracy of defense acquisition systems which span multiple offices and program managers so that was the atlantic about the same time that president trump had that phone call with captain hanafin so sometimes improvements in technology drive procurement once you have a jet engine you don't want propeller planes once you have supersonic fighters you don't want subsonic fighters once you have precision guided munitions you don't want dumb bombs once you have stealth capability you don't want airplanes that aren't stealth so that's a driver for military procurement as we go forward the same is true in terms of the difference between nimitz class and ford class the nimitz class has been around since the late 60s at this point we have 10 of them now the 10 nimitz class are not carbon copies of each other each one's a little different as technology improved over the decades that these ships were being made they tried to incorporate them on each new one that was being built but by and large they're the same meaning they use the mark 7 catapult system the arresting gear is the same the same nuclear power plant and the islands have movable radars so in the early 2000s a design team came to the navy and said we have a technology that will eliminate the need to make steam to power your cats the navy was all ears because as captain hanafan said the need to generate steam is a huge burden on the nuclear reactors and the crew so based on that idea they started to design the ford class so what's with all the bad press what is the ground truth about the uss gerald r ford so i read the crs report so you don't have to the high points are we have four ford class carriers in the program of record ford kennedy enterprise and the miller ford costs roughly 13 billion dollars kennedy is programmed to cost roughly 11 billion dollars so there are some efficiencies being realized as we learn lessons from the manufacturer of ford and the last of the four is not scheduled to hit the fleet until 2032 so this is a lengthy process to get these ships built one of the main problems with ford overall has been the number of systems that they're trying to put on this new class of carrier at the same time in fact at a recent conference in the washington dc area the chief of naval operations admiral mike gilday said the following quote we had 23 new technologies on that ship which quite frankly increased the risk of delivery on time and cost right from the get-go we really shouldn't introduce more than maybe one or two new technologies on any complex platform like that in order to make sure that we keep risk at a manageable level end quote so you heard the cno talk about 23 new technologies i want to focus on four these four particularly are what make the ford class carrier a generational improvement and what will underwrite our ability to control the seas for decades to follow here's a nice diagram of 16 of the 23. let's focus on the four major ones starting with the electromagnetic aircraft launching system emails so as i said emails uses linear induction basically magnetic electric fields to drag the shuttle down the cat different than the mark 7 system that i used for basically 825 cat shots over the course of my career as you see in this diagram here the mark 7 system is powered by steam piped through the ship into cylinders and is used to drive these rams down the cat track and drag airplanes into the air so now with ford class you don't have to dedicate part of the power generated to the generation of steam that's a big selling point as captain hanafin said he spends a lot of time aboard the uss ronald reagan chasing steam around the ship to power the cats so with emails was first tested at the field up at lakehurst you can see the footage here of a c2 greyhound using emails to launch and a super hornet looks like it's working great then you take it to the ship so when they first tried to put emails aboard the carrier it didn't fit so back to the drawing board literally they had to redesign some of the spaces in order that the system would fit where it needs to be also it was heavier than originally designed so that required some workarounds to make sure you maintain the designed center of buoyancy of the fort but eventually they worked out the bugs you see here the first ever catapult shot this is a vx-23 that's the developmental test team at pax river launching on cat one of ford another great feature of emails is because these are digital programmed catapults the shot is more linear meaning smoother and therefore it won't bust systems during the stroke we had that happen that tomcat a lot by the end of the stroke on some of the older carriers you would dump your imu and other stuff and basically be blind when you got airborne with the email system that won't be the case the other major selling point about emails is it's easier to maintain i've seen a mark 7 cat torn apart while we were in port the debt crew got no liberty during that time and they were covered in greece it is a serious mess the promise of emails is easier to maintain and fewer personnel required to maintain it the other promise of emails is the frequency between cat shots so you don't have to wait for the steam plant to get back up to pressure in order to launch another airplane it's ready to go as soon as the shuttle gets back to the starting position so in theory this would generate more sorties the limiting factor now becomes how quickly can pilots taxi over the jbd and get in the shuttle so for me this is good news in that many times my pilot and i have been sitting in the shuttle waiting for the steam plant to get up to speed before we can launch so i'm buying the idea that emails will allow the ford class to shoot more airplanes quicker than the nimitz class another thing the cno mentioned recently about the ford program and this has been a high vis subsystem the weapons elevators so so you know gilda recently said the following quote one of the things you learned from the ford program was the importance of land-based testing on new systems before you introduce them to the fleet so the elevators unlike catapults that were tested at lakehurst before they were put on the ship and even then as i said they've had some issues in terms of making them fit not to mention making them work once they have them in place so with the weapons elevators they just stuck them on the ship and then discovered that they didn't work so they've had to do a bunch of testing and retesting and it's delayed the ship's schedule and these delays cost money there are some self-inflicted wounds to senator mccain's point it's not the technology it's the execution the programmatics and the way the acquisition system works so the second new system is the advanced arresting gear the aag so the legacy arresting gear that's on nimitz is an old system here you see the two-wire arresting gear mechanism for the uss abraham lincoln you can see the long cylinders on either end and those are full of hydraulic fluid and that's what slows the aircraft as it comes aboard these long cylinders are called rams and when an airplane traps it is really loud i can tell you this because on every carrier i was on our ready room was right next to one of the arresting gear machines and as we briefed we'd keep one eye on the platte camera so when somebody trapped you'd plug your ears and wait for the wire and then start the brief again this system requires a lot of maintenance it's also an analog system that requires an automatic overhaul when you reach a certain amount of arrested landings regardless of the condition of the equipment at that time so most of the nimitz class have four arresting wires ford only has three so that aag doesn't use that long cylinder to stop the motion of an airplane after it catches the wire it uses a paddle wheel system the other thing about the advanced arresting gear and emails is they have health monitoring which neither the mark 7 nor the legacy arresting gear have so this is safer in that these systems will flag issues before it's too late now both emails and ag will allow the four class to operate unmanned aircraft nimitz class arresting gear systems have trouble with lightweight aircraft like future planned unmanned aircraft because they're not heavy enough when they touch down to have the wire what they call reeve pay out so the wire basically acts as a static barrier and it would just rip the tail hook off of the drone so the aag takes care of that problem and this is the future planned for us unmanned platforms are part of the program going forward so the bottom line with the two systems emails and aag safer flight ops more sorties less maintenance fewer personnel required to operate and maintain the systems the next thing you see is the island the island looks nothing like a nimitz-class island first it's located dramatically further aft than on the nimitz class and it's also outboard this is mostly for radar signature this island also generates less burble which is the disturbance in the airflow that can affect airplanes as they're trying to land it has no moving parts so you're not going to see any antennas twirling around like you do on a nimitz class its signature system is a dual band radar now the dual band radar is not state of the art because of the time it takes to procure these systems it's already behind the times but it is a big improvement over what nimitz has so last major system that the ford has are different reactors ford powers its new systems with two a1b nuclear reactors that can generate almost three times more power than the a4w reactors used on nimitz-class carriers so again this is what not having to generate steam for the cats yields now three times more power can be used for a lot of things so as we talk about the near pier conflict and the return to the high-end fight vis-a-vis china and russia and hypersonic weapons and the vulnerability of an aircraft carrier this can be used for self-defense system directed energy weapons and other things that nimitz class couldn't even conceive of because you couldn't generate the kind of power required for these things so we'll stay tuned for rail guns and different things going forward that will be game changers with respect to the ship's self-defense capability ford recently had what we call shock trials something they initially tried to skip with ford and do with kennedy but the late senator mccain insisted that they do these shock trials so they did these a couple of months ago and by all reports they went well so another thing to note about left hand right hand of procurement is the ford cannot operate with f35 c's it's not configured in order to do so you have to modify some of the spaces for some of the classified stuff on an f35 and you have to beef up the jet blast deflectors because that single engine is really hot and over time on a deployment you'd start to melt the jbd so that's not good so that modification is going to be what they call feathered in in time once the ford needs other planned maintenance in fact there's only one aircraft carrier that can operate with the f-35c currently that's the carl vinson underway right now for the first time with the f-35 and the other aircraft carriers are scheduled to be modified along with other maintenance as we go forward to be able to deploy with f-35cs so at sierra space that same recent conference cno also said he wants to have ford deployed in 2022 for the first time so just like with any game-changing technology after all of the heartaches the cost overruns the schedule breaches the test point failures you get a capability and in the case of the ford class i'm optimistic that we're creating a capability that will serve the nation for decades to come as we saw with the ever given when that container ship got stuck in the suez canal the resin effects of sea commerce shutting down are substantial so that was one ship stuck in the swiss canal imagine what something like a war with china would do to global markets like the nimitz class has done so well the ford class carrier is designed to make sure that doesn't happen all right that's going to do it for this episode if you're a first time viewer please ring the bell and become a subscriber give me the likes very important to the algorithm please comment the discussions we get going among this channel's community are a true value add if you'd like to help support the channel please consider using the super thanks in the comments or become a patron at patreon.com wardcarroll check the links below for official t-shirts and merch and how to pre-order the forthcoming 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Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 328,602

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F-14 Tomcat, USS Gerald R. Ford, CVN-78, Nimitz class aircraft carriers, aircraft carriers, nuclear powered aircraft carriers, U.S. Navy, defense acquisition, Donald J. Trump, steam catapults, EMALS, AAG, dual band radar, nuclear reactors, F-35C, Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, Admiral John Richardson, Huntington Ingalls, Mike Petters, weapons elevators, Lakehurst, unmanned aircraft, Mk-7 arresting gear, arresting gear, USS Wasp

Id: 0g2enjnzxQY

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021