Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] has delivered the second and final composite deckhouse for the Navy’s new fleet of Zumwalt-class (DDG-1000) destroyers and at the same time closed the facility that built it, the company said Thursday.
The composite deckhouse will be installed on the second
Zumwalt, the future USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001), at General Dynamics [GD] Bath Iron Works in Maine.
Huntington Ingalls built the deckhouses at a facility in Gulfport, Miss. that was closed following the delivery of the structure last week, spokesman Bill Glenn said. Huntington Ingalls has laid off 352 of the 427 employees at Gulfport, while the remaining workforce was being transferred to a shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., Glenn said.
Huntington Ingalls announced last year it would shutter Gulfport following the Navy’s decision to abandon plans to use a composite deckhouse for the third and final Zumwalt. The service a year ago gave Bath Iron Works a $212-million contract to build a steel deckhouse.
“Closing Gulfport was a difficult but necessary decision,” Glenn said. “Due to the reduction in the Zumwalt-class (DDG-1000) ship construction and the U.S. Navy decision to use steel products on Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002), there is both limited and declining Navy use for composite products from the Gulfport facility. Following the DDG-1001 deckhouse delivery (July 31), the facility officially closed.”
The Navy elected to go with the steal deckhouse on the Johnson after negotiations with Huntington Ingalls to bring down the price for a potential third composite deckhouse failed. There had been cost overruns on the composite versions, but the Navy has also said shifting to steel would save money anyways, and concluded that a steel deckhouse would not negatively impact weight limits.
HII’s 900-ton deckhouse will host the Monsoor’s bridge, radars, antennae as well as other systems, and is designed to reduce enemy radar detection.
The Johnson is expected to be delivered in 2018, while the first two ships, the Zumwalt and Monsoor, are scheduled for transfer to the Navy over the next two years.
General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls are two of the four prime contractors on the DDG-1000 program. The others are Raytheon [RTN], the systems integrator, and BAE Systems, which is supplying the advanced gun system.