Sorry Everyone. American Aircraft Carriers Are Crap.

Or at least, the USS Ford and the follow on ships in its class (two already started, one more contracted) are crap. The latest problem is sending the USS Ford back to drydock to completely rework the steam turbines that power the ship. It will be there for at least 3 months, further pushing back the ship's delivery date that has already been delayed for years and years. And that's on top of the extremely problematic electronic catapult and arresting system, its failure-ridden radar (which won't be used on the follow-on ships), and its mostly non-functioning weapon elevators.

And to make matters worse, the Navy is strongly considering scrapping the USS Truman, a working carrier with lots of life still in it, to save money.

 

The problem is that the US Military has been trying to do something called "concurrency" in its weapon production. Basically, there are no prototype or test subsystems built - the first thing built is technically a production model, and things that need to be fixed - or even designed - will be done while production is ongoing. This was really bad for the F-35, which had intense delays and cost overruns, and the first batches of which will end up as test/training/aggressor examples anyway because they can't be upgraded to the capabilities of later examples. It's even worse for the USS Ford class. You can't say "this $14 billion (and counting) carrier will only be used for training". They very well may have to rip these things up multiple times over many years to finally get catapults and arresters that work.

 

In case you were wondering how things are going almost two years later, it's actually looking better. The Ford is conducting its first real tests with large numbers of aircraft of different kinds to figure out what the ship can do and how to go about doing it, and one of the promises of the electrical catapult and recovery system is being realized - everything works so fast the limiting factor is how fast the crew can push aircraft around and do the pre-flights. They've launched more than 5000 sorties this year. They also seem pretty stoked about the intelligence handling systems on board. But it's still going to be a couple years before this joins the fleet.

And hey, they just got the 7th of the 9 weapon elevators working now.

 

I don't know if anyone is still paying attention, but they finally got the last weapon elevator working around Christmas.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigh...-weapons-elevators-delivered/?sh=6ed6fa173a24