As Supercarrier Ford Launches Largest-Ever Flight Ops, Leaders Try Out New Ways to Fight19 Nov 2020 Hope Hodge Seck"OFF THE COAST OF NORFOLK, Virginia -- Even for those familiar with the impressive acreage of a Nimitz-class carrier flight deck, the vastness of the Gerald R. Ford's flattop is eye-watering. While the Navy's newest class of supercarrier has the same overall footprint as the predecessor class, its use of space is different: The Ford's "island," which houses its command center, is set 140 feet further aft and has been slightly redesigned. It creates a more substantial stretch of aircraft flight line at the fore, with five usable acres compared with the Nimitz's four and a half....
...During a 12-plane Super Hornet launch and recovery period that Military.com observed, the ship's digitally controlled Advanced Arresting Gear, replacing the legacy hydraulic aircraft recovery system, operated without a hitch, with all landing aircraft catching the first or second of the system's three wires. Several aircraft were waved off as crew raced to reset the deck from a previous landing; in one case, crew members ran to free a jet that hadn't properly unhooked itself from a loop of the massive recovery cable.
Similarly, the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, which replaces the older steam-based catapult system, got planes airborne without a noticeable hitch. As recently as this summer, the system was working out bugs; on June 2, the crew of the Ford discovered an issue with the EMALS power handling system requiring a workaround, USNI News reported....
...Cummings emphasized that operating the software for the Advanced Arresting Gear in particular requires substantial on-the-job training, and sailors are still building their familiarity with it and learning how to troubleshoot issues. "The learning curve is just how to better understand the system technically, and as we get smarter about how certain [issues], and how we can clear them and get back to work. So that's the learning curves, basically work in the software," he said.
Officials said they find the speed of operations is most often limited by human elements, as the flight deck crew adapts to the rhythm of launch and recovery. The ship's current objective is to recover an aircraft every 55 seconds; already, during PDT&T, the crew has been able to get four jets airborne, from four different catapults, in the space of one minute, 47 seconds.
"We're rapidly hitting the point where the limitation on EMALS is how fast the flight deck crew can taxi aircraft in the shuttle, get us hooked up, run through our pre-launch checks, and then get the aircraft airborne," Rear Adm. Craig Clapperton, commanding officer of Carrier Strike Group 12, told reporters aboard the Ford. "What we have seen since we first came out here in March to where we are now in November, it's night and day from where we were, and it's trending in a great direction."
In January, the Ford had completed 747 aircraft launches since it was delivered to the Navy in May 2017; it now has nearly 6,000.... Before the ship ever conducts an operational deployment, it must be modified to accommodate the F-35C Joint Strike Fighter, which won't happen until 2024 or 2025. And the ship's advanced weapons elevators are still only partially operational. During the underway, contractors with Newport News Shipbuilding worked to get the seventh of 11 up and running...."
Source: https://www.military.com/daily-news/202 ... fight.html