NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.–Sea trials of the first Ford-class aircraft carrier are expected to begin this week by shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] followed by the Navy’s acceptance trials later this month, Navy officials said on Monday.
The builder’s trials for the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) are expected to be followed two to three weeks later by the Navy’s sea trials and if all goes well the Navy expects to accept delivery of the new aircraft carrier, as early as late this month and possibly in early May, service officials said at the annual Sea Air Space symposium sponsored by the Navy League.
Last summer the Navy estimated that the CVN-78 would be delivered in November 2016 but that date slipped and earlier this year the service began targeting April for delivery.
Construction of the CVN-78 is 99 percent complete, Capt. Doug Oglesby, program manager for the Navy’s second and third Ford-class aircraft carriers, CVN-79 and CVN-80, said during a briefing at the symposium. The USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79) is 27 percent through construction, he said. Construction of USS Enterprise (CVN-80) is scheduled to get underway in June 2018 with delivery in the late 2027 or early 2028.
The first phase of the Kennedy is slated for delivery in June 2022, Oglesby said.
The CVN-78 recently completed pier-side “fast cruise” trials at HII’s facilities in Newport News, Va., Oglesby said. While the ship was at the pier, the sailors onboard went through the day-to-day routine operations of the ship during fast cruise trials.
The Ford-class carrier is the first new aircraft carrier design for the Navy in 40 years. The new class will replace the Nimitz-class of carriers over a number of decades.
Oglesby outlined a number of advantages the Ford-class will provide versus the Nimitz-class, including a 33 percent increase in aircraft sortie generation, 20 percent lower maintenance costs, and a $4 billion reduction in life-cycle costs.
HII is applying lessons learned on CVN-78 to the CVN-79. Oglesby said more than 60,000 lessons have been learned on construction of the Gerald R. Ford and that is expected to result in an 18 percent reduction in production hours on the John F. Kennedy, he said. An 8 percent reduction in production hours is being targeted for the Enterprise, he said.
If the Navy decides to eventually compress construction of Ford-class carriers, the first opportunity for this will be CVN-81, Oglesby said.