USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) has arrived in Commander, Fleet Activities Yokosuka(CFAY).. Yokosuka Japan as the Seventh Fleet Forward deployed aircraft carrier.
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Aircraft Carriers III
- Thread starter Jeff Head
- Start date
asif iqbal
Lieutenant General
Add to that the growing power of JMSDF and you have a top tier fleet with plenty of flat deck action
Sasebo also hosts LHA fleet
And add 2 x Izumo, 2 x Hyuga and 3 x Ossumi class
Sasebo also hosts LHA fleet
And add 2 x Izumo, 2 x Hyuga and 3 x Ossumi class
Jura The idiot
General
I put some parts in boldface:
McCain: Ford-Class Overruns May Mean Fewer Supercarriers
EDIT
now I listened to Senator ...
McCain: Ford-Class Overruns May Mean Fewer Supercarriers
source:The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday blasted the U.S. Navy’s Ford-class aircraft carrier program as an acquisition debacle.
Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona who served as a naval aviator during Vietnam, didn’t waste anytime launching into his criticism of the sea service’s $40 billion effort to develop the first three new supercarriers.
“The Ford-class aircraft carrier program is one of our nation’s most complex and most expensive defense acquisition projects,” he said in his opening statement during a hearing on the matter. “It’s also become, unfortunately, one of the most spectacular acquisition debacles in recent memory — and that’s saying something.”
While the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), the first ship in the class, is scheduled to be delivered to the Navy in May — after more than a dozen years of development — the second ship is five years behind schedule, McCain said. What’s more, the acquisition program is estimated to be more than $6 billion over budget — and questions remain about the reliability of core systems.
The senator criticized the lack of accountability among officials in the Navy, Pentagon and even Congress for the schedule delays and cost overruns. In a clear shot to the builder, Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc., McCain said the cost of the program is so out of control that it may force the U.S. to change how it buys such ships in the future.
“We simply cannot afford to pay $12.9 billion for a single ship,” he said. “If these costs are not controlled, we must be willing to pursue alternatives that can deliver similar capabilities to our warfighters on time and on budget.
“We must be willing to question whether we need to go back to building smaller, cheaper aircraft carriers that could bring new competitors into this market,” he added. “We might even have to consider re-balancing our long-range strike portfolio with fewer carriers and more land-based or precision-guided weapons. If we can’t do better, everything must be on the table.”
Katrina McFarland, assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, said the program has largely been “stabilized.“
Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, said the Ford-class carriers are hugely complex, will be in service until 2080 and must have the technology to “defeat the future threat” but “at a cost that the nation can bear.”
J. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s top weapons tester, said low or unknown reliability and performance of the such new technologies as the advanced arresting gear (AAG), the electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS), the dual band radar (DBR), and the advanced weapons elevators (AWE) are “significant risks.”
Paul Francis, a managing director at the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in prepared testimony that CVN 78 “is unlikely to achieve promised aircraft launch and recovery rates as key systems are unreliable. The ship must complete its final, more complex, construction phase concurrent with key test events. While problems are likely to be encountered, there is no margin for the unexpected. Additional costs are likely.”
EDIT
now I listened to Senator ...
Last edited:
Jura The idiot
General
AAG news:
Manned Advanced Arresting Gear Testing To Begin In February, Wrap Up After Carrier Ford Delivers
Manned Advanced Arresting Gear Testing To Begin In February, Wrap Up After Carrier Ford Delivers
source:The Navy will begin testing manned airplanes on its Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) at a New Jersey test site in February and will complete testing on all type/model/series in the months after the new carrier Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) is delivered, Navy officials said on Thursday.
A 2013 hardware redesign on the General Atomics AAG has proven successful after more than 1,000 traps with dead load weights, Rear Adm. Donald Gaddis, Program Executive Officer for Tactical Aircraft, told reporters after a Senate hearing Thursday.
“We feel confident we can deliver hardware to the ship without having to go back and redesign or remove and replace anything we’ve delivered to the ship,” he said, noting that the ship is moving on with its test schedule as AAG continues land-based testing.
The remaining concerns with AAG all deal with software – particularly, whether the system can detect and help correct planes that land off-center on the carrier flight deck. The “divergent trajectory” issue is important because if a plane veers more than 20 feet off the centerline on the flight deck it would risk hitting people or equipment.
The software work currently taking place is “making sure that if the airplane doesn’t land on centerline – in other words, it’s off center 10 feet, 15 feet or as much as 20 feet – that the airplane stays inside that foul line. And that requires the software that the AAG system that’s on the right hand of the ship and the left-hand side of the ship know what’s happening to the wire as its paying out on the flight deck. So that requires a lot of software, requires a lot of test-analyze-fix on the software as well,” Gaddis said.
“At this point in the program, that is a very very low risk of anything happening in terms of concurrency to the hardware that we’ve already delivered to the ship,” he said, adding he was confident that software-only testing and fixing would address the divergent trajectory issue.
Once that software work is complete, Gaddis must then test each type of aircraft on AAG at the land-based Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division – Lakehurst, N.J. before the planes can go to the ship for at-sea AAG tests.
Gaddis said he would begin with the Super Hornets in February and will issue an Aircraft Recovery Bulletin in the summer once testing is complete.
“The plan right now is to do these recovery bulletins in incremental steps,” he said.
“We’ll start with the Super Hornet E/F, then we’ll go to the F-18C and then we’ll go to the E2 [Hawkeye] and C-2 [Greyhound]. And our plan is to do all those type/model/series and get all those recovery bulletins done before we hand it over to [the director of operational test and evaluation.”
Though all the bulletins will be issued by the time Ford reaches operational test, only the Super Hornet will be allowed on the flight deck when the ship delivers. Rear Adm. Tom Moore, Program Executive Officer for Aircraft Carriers, said after the hearing that that wouldn’t cause any delays, as he just needs any planes to train the ship’s crew and certify the flight deck.
“Even though I only have one aircraft once I deliver the ship, the ship doesn’t care – the catapults and arresting gear are agnostic to what type of planes land on them,” he said.
“What I need from the shipbuilding side of the house is, I need to be able to take the ship out and exercise the flight deck, exercise [Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System] and AAG and have a crew start training to move aircraft on the flight deck. It’s a brand new flight deck, brand new pit stop refueling. So it doesn’t matter to me how many different type/model/series, I just need planes for launching and recovering during the six-month period between delivery and before I take it in for the post-shakedown availability.”
Moore also addressed a delay in the ship’s final at-sea trials before delivery. On Sept. 22 Moore due to a “deterioration” in progress on shipboard testing ahead of sea trials.
After the hearing, Moore said there are 246 systems on the ship that have to be tested, some of which are being turned on now for the first time.
“We took a look at the volume of work, the pace of testing. The test program on the ship is the first time that we have had the opportunity to exercise and test equipment that was in many cases designed 20 years ago,” he said.
“So as we’ve gone and energized this equipment for the first time, the pace of that testing has not proceeded at the pace we had expected it to be, so it’s taken us a little bit longer.”
After concluding he would not be ready for sea trials at the current shipboard testing pace, he considered the possibility of spending more money to accelerate the pace of preparations.
“My assessment was throwing additional resources at the schedule would probably cost a lot more money and may not in fact buy me back the schedule, so I went to [Navy acquisition chief Sean] Stackley and said, sir, the prudent thing to do is to move the sea trials out six to eight weeks – we have not changed the delivery date yet – and then give ourselves in that six to eight weeks, give ourselves the opportunity at the pace we’re at right now to finish the testing on the ship.”
Moore said there are more than 4,000 tests to conduct on the ship and the crew is making good progress. The Navy is 68 percent done with hull, mechanical and electrical systems tests, 42 percent done with electronics tests and 78 percent done with the propulsion plant.
asif iqbal
Lieutenant General
USS Ronald Reagan with Izumo enetering her new homeport.
Wow what a shot
First we get 3 x Mistral class now a JMSDF flat deck and a Nimitz class
I would like to see more !!
Jura The idiot
General
from NavyTimes ... I put one concurrency-related paragraph in boldface:
Lawmakers blast Navy for delays with Ford-class carrier
Lawmakers blast Navy for delays with Ford-class carrier
source:Senators blasted Navy leaders for cost overruns and delays in building the first-in-class supercarrier Gerald R. Ford, which features leap-ahead technologies that have hamstrung timely production.
The future carrier Gerald R. Ford and the follow-on John F. Kennedy are the first two ships of the Ford-class carrier program, which has risen $4.7 billion over budget estimates and fallen five years behind the initial production schedule.
“While we recognize that designing and building an aircraft is difficult and costly, the committee is concerned that some of the problems were foreseeable and should have been resolved years ago,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking democrat on the Senate Armed Service Committee, said at a Thursday hearing.
Other senators criticized the Navy for underestimating the magnitude of the Ford-class ships, which feature new systems like the advanced arresting gear and electromagnetic catapults that have had technical problems. The Ford is now expected to be delivered to the service next May, eight months after it was initially projected for completion.
The estimated cost for the future carrier Ford was raised to $12.9 billion, up $2.4 billion from the original estimate.
Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, explained that some cost overruns stemmed from problems early in the supercarrier building and design process.
“I am accountable,” Stackley said, addressing the chairman, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “Costs were estimated, and design and production proceeded with inadequate information regarding the complexity of the new systems.”
Stackley said risk factors were not properly recognized and this impacted cost at each development stage. Production of the Ford is now 95 percent complete and cost-performance improvements are being implemented, Stackley said.
The Government Accountability Office recently released an in-depth study of the program's failures.
“Right now we’re looking at getting less for more,” Paul Francis, the GAO's managing director of acquisition and sourcing management, said. The Navy, he said, essentially has to hit “seven home runs in the bottom of the ninth” to meet the most recent cost estimates.
The Ford-class supercarriers were developed to replace the Nimitz-class carriers, the first of which was authorized by Congress in 1967 during the Vietnam War. (To be sure, the first three Nimitz-class ships suffered repeated production delays; it took seven years to build the first in-class Nimitz.)
Some of the new technology planned for the Ford-class carriers includes a new electrical distribution system, enlarged flight deck and an electromagnetic catapult system. It also includes many crew comfort updates, such as bigger gyms and smaller berthings. The carriers are expected to last for fifty years.
“It is therefore imperative that our future carrier force have the capability necessary to defeat the future threat, but too, that it does so at a cost the nation can bear,” Stackley said.
Second F-35C test on the Eisenhower have yet begin, harsh conditions but he do the job !
The F-35 Lightning II Program is conducting its second developmental test (DT-II) at sea. While aboard USS Eisenhower (CVN 69) from October 2-15, the Pax River Integrated Test Force (ITF) will test F-35C carrier suitability and integration in the at-sea environment. The test team will achieve this objective through a series of test events designed to gradually expand the aircraft operating envelope at sea. Shipboard testing delivers the opportunity to conduct routine F-35C operations while embarked on an aircraft carrier. The F-35C will perform a variety of operational maneuvers during DT-II — including catapult takeoffs and arrested landings — while simulating maintenance operations and conducting general maintenance and fit tests for the aircraft and support equipment. Following the analysis of DT-II test data, the team will conduct a thorough assessment of the F-35C’s performance in the shipboard environment before advising the Navy on any adjustments necessary to ensure that the fifth-generation fighter is ready to meet its scheduled IOC in 2018.
Great stuff there !
Jura The idiot
General
I forgot what the acronym means 
it's Unmanned Carrier-Launched Aerial Strike and Surveillance
Leaders debate next steps for UCLASS, carrier drones
it's Unmanned Carrier-Launched Aerial Strike and Surveillance Leaders debate next steps for UCLASS, carrier drones
source:Planes without a pilot in the seat are the future of aviation, top Navy officials have said, but aircraft carriers are in a holding pattern as they wait for the Navy's embattled next-generation carrier drone to get off the ground.
The House and Senate Armed Services committees agreed to invest $350 million next year into pre-acquisition projects for the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Aerial Strike and Surveillance program. In the meantime, some in the carrier Navy would like to get some more practice before UCLASS comes online around 2025.
But that's complicated, said one unmanned aviation expert, because the Navy doesn't want to keep flying a drone designed by one company while it's asking all of them to compete for the follow-on.
At the annual Tailhook Reunion near Reno, Nevada, in mid-September, a senior officer asked a panel of admirals whether a case could be made to use the Navy's unmanned strike fighter prototype to practice carrier integration in the mean time.
"Is there a way that we can start interjecting unmanned aviation into the carrier deck early, instead of waiting until we get UCLASS through the DoD 5000 process?" asked Cmdr. Mike "Jockey" Lisa, an EA-18G Growler pilot and the requirements manager for Electronic Attack Wing Pacific at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington, who was referring to the Pentagon's acquisition process.
The Navy does have an unmanned carrier jet, the X-47B, but its program came with a strict list of milestones. Once it proved that it could land on a carrier, take off, integrate with manned jets in the pattern and then aerially refuel, it was designated for the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.
The aircraft, which looks like a miniature version of Northrop's old B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, is wider than the F/A-18 Hornets it has flown with and is designed to fly at Mach 0.9 at up to 40,000 feet over more than 2,100 nautical miles before it needs to be refueled.
"In other words, other than just a neat demonstration — a one-off — actually putting it to some operations so that we can culturally start figuring some things out, by not waiting a generation until we get through that process," Lisa added.
Vice Adm. Dave Dunaway, head of Naval Air Systems Command, pointed to acquisitions red tape as the reason for the hold-up.
A request for proposals is the first step to getting a new acquisition project off the ground, and Dunaway said his team has written three of them but was still waiting for congressional approval.
"Can we bring an unmanned vehicle to the carrier much faster? Technically? Absolutely," Dunaway said. "Organizationally, it appears to be impossible."
Lawmakers have been reluctant to get the ball rolling on UCLASS until the Navy figures out exactly what it will be — those S's stand for strike and surveillance, and there's some debate over which should take precedence.
"There’s a political battle going on with what kind of capability we need coming off the carrier," Dunaway added.
Back in March, Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, made headlines when he accused the Navy's UCLASS requirements of being "strategically misguided," in a to Defense Secretary Ash Carter obtained by the U.S. Naval Institute.
"I am concerned that the current requirements proposed for the UCLASS program place a disproportionate emphasis on unrefueled endurance to enable sustained ISR support to the carrier strike group, which would result in an aircraft design with serious deficiencies in both long-term survivability and its internal weapons payload capacity," he wrote.
McCain, a retired Navy fighter pilot, argued that the Navy should focus more on creating an unmanned strike fighter. He added that he would like to see more testing with the Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration vehicle, the program that became Northrop Grumman's X-47B.
"Our nation has made a sizable investment in this demonstration program to date, and both air vehicles have consumed only a small fraction of their approved flying hours," he wrote.
The issue, according to an unmanned aviation expert, is that the Navy wants to keep the market wide open for its next unmanned vehicle.
"They don’t want to use the X-47B because they believe it would give an advantage to Northrop Grumman in the UCLASS competition," Phil Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, told Navy Times in an Oct. 1 phone interview.
However, he added, more hours spent flying the Northrop Grumman aircraft won't give them any more of a leg-up than they already have from manufacturing UCLASS's predecessor.
"The requirements of the UCLASS competition themselves will very strongly determine which company has the advantage," he said.
Northrop's expertise in strike and stealthy reconnaissance would put it at the head of the pack if the Navy decides to focus there, with Lockheed right behind it, Finnegan said.
But if they go for a more straightforward vehicle that does recon in an uncontested environment, he added, it would favor companies like Boeing and General Atomics.
All four contractors have put forth potential designs, with Northrop's based on its X-47B model. The Lockheed version, dubbed "Sea Ghost," looks a lot like the Air Force's RQ-170 Sentinel, with the same batwing design as the X-47B.
Boeing has come up with the "Phantom Ray," another batwing model, and General Atomics is offering the "Sea Avenger," which looks a lot like the Reapers it has designed for the Air Force and other federal agencies.
All four plans have a wingspan between 50 to 70 feet, with variations in speed, endurance and payloads.
"It makes total sense," Finnegan said, for current carrier crews to get some practice with the X-47B while they wait on UCLASS.
"It’s a desire for the Navy, which is the service which has least used unmanned systems and is behind the Army and the Air Force, to gain expertise," he said. "And to gain expertise from the carrier makes a lot of sense when you’re planning a major acquisition that would come from a carrier."