“Based on the contract signed by the Navy and shipbuilder in 2008, the Ford should have been delivered in September 2015 at a cost of $10.5 billion.

Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Defense News in a statement he had been tracking the elevator issue closely for the last three years and that, while recognizing the effort of the contractors to get the work done, this work shouldn’t still be taking place four and a half years after the carrier was commissioned into the fleet. But within months, Spencer had to admit that the weapons elevators would not be finished until the end of 2021 or maybe 2022, which he blamed on Huntington Ingalls Industries for a lack of adequate communication.Īt one point in 2020, the Navy was pushing to complete all the elevators by mid-2021 ahead of shock trials, which also did not pan out. That same month, in January 2019, then-Navy Secretary Richard Spencer announced he’d told then-President Donald Trump that if the weapons elevators aren’t functioning by midsummer, Trump should fire him. The final elevator was turned over to the crew on Dec. Throughout this time, contractors have worked on the elevators both while the ship was in port and while it was operating at sea, completing one elevator after the next and turning them over to the crew to begin using in operations. To avoid further delays, the Navy allowed the crew and air wing to start training on the ship in spring 2020, conducting post-delivery tests and trials and eventually conducting shock trials over the summer of 2021. AWE is one of 23 brand-new technologies developed for the Ford-class carriers, several of which lagged in development or saw delays during testing - ultimately pushing the ship’s planned maiden deployment from 2018 to the currently projected late 2022.ĪWE was the last of these new technologies to be fixed. The weapons elevators transport massive munitions from the depths of the ship up to the hangar bay and to the flight deck, where fighter jets can be armed before missions.

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