Thread: USS Gerald R Ford makes history

All is not well in the US Navy's procurement system. Go to foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/ and look up these two recent articles for a start:
- America's New $13 Billion Aircraft Carrier Is Still Far From Ready
- The Slow Death Of The Carrier Air Wing

In going away from steam to magnetic/electric systems, they unfortunately gave the contract for the launching and arrested landings of aircraft to a company that had never done this before and ignored the company's who have been doing it for more than 70 years. The US Navy requirement is 16,500 landings between critical failures. So far the landing system has failed every 25 or so landings. The new catapult launch system is much better though - it fails roughly every 400 launches. The problem of course is the required number of launches between failures is 4,166.....

LOTS of issues at the moment as the technology is in it's infancy compared to steam systems. Will be great when it works, but don't hold your breath for the next 10 years or so. Concurrency is turning into an unmitigated disaster for not only this project but others also.

Yes, I thought it was interesting they'd gone to this technology without fully testing it. The steam catapults have been perfected over the years, but do damage the aircraft each time they are used, so I can see why they want to move to something that is a little more sympathetic to the airframes, but I suppose it does need to work when required...

When they launch & land them by Magnetic Levitation I'll be impressed .

They haven't got the new catapults or arrester system anywhere near sorted yet. Apparently, instead of limiting stresses, they are massively increasing them and the amount of cumulative damage they are doing to the test aircraft is not good and they are starting to write-off airframes.

How does this magnetic system work? Is it just using electromagnetic force in place of steam with the same catapult and arrest or cables? Or majic?

Originally Posted by cripesamighty

All is not well in the US Navy's procurement system. Go to foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/ and look up these two recent articles for a start:
- America's New $13 Billion Aircraft Carrier Is Still Far From Ready
- The Slow Death Of The Carrier Air Wing

In going away from steam to magnetic/electric systems, they unfortunately gave the contract for the launching and arrested landings of aircraft to a company that had never done this before and ignored the company's who have been doing it for more than 70 years. The US Navy requirement is 16,500 landings between critical failures. So far the landing system has failed every 25 or so landings. The new catapult launch system is much better though - it fails roughly every 400 launches. The problem of course is the required number of launches between failures is 4,166.....

LOTS of issues at the moment as the technology is in it's infancy compared to steam systems. Will be great when it works, but don't hold your breath for the next 10 years or so. Concurrency is turning into an unmitigated disaster for not only this project but others also.

So,The Don's tweet was correct?

Because the new RN carriers were fitted with gas turbine propulsion, steam catapults were out of the question. The Brit. gov. asked BAE to make the necessary changes to its contract obligations to fit one of the new EMALs launch system. They were told it would cost over 2 billion GBP. So now the RN is stuck with a carrier that can only fly off the F35B, an aircraft so expensive the RN can not afford enough aircraft for both offensive, and defensive operations. Considering the fact the RN is phasing out their Harpoon missiles, with no replacement in sight, the only offensive weapon in the RN's arsenal at the moment is the 4.5 inch gun.