Ford Aircraft Carriers Not Ready For F-35s, So Aging Vinson Gets The Call05 Nov 2019 Paul McLeary"The long road the F-35 took to finally being ready to deploy has forced the Navy's new $13 billion carrier class to leave the plane behind -- for now at least. [Long post - more at jump about 'LIGHTNING CARRIERS' again / FORD etc.]
WASHINGTON: The Navy is upgrading one of its oldest aircraft carriers to be the first to fly the service’s newest plane, the F-35C, giving it a capability the service’s brand-new $13 billion carrier, the delayed and trouble-prone USS Gerald R. Ford, won’t have for years once it deploys.
Navy officials say the Ford and its follow-on carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, are not being built to carry F-35s, and will have to undergo upgrades years after they’ve deployed. The plan is in keeping with a complicated maintenance and upgrade schedule the service has devised to marry ships with the Joint Strike Fighter as both become available.
The plane couldn’t have been included in the designs for the first two of four planned Ford carriers, one Navy official told me, because the F-35C’s final form was still a work in progress when the final design for the Fords was wrapping up.
That means the 36-year old USS Carl Vinson, which started its build under the Nixon administration and launched in 1983, will be the F-35s first home at sea. The ship is currently undergoing a $34 million refit in Bremerton Wash. until July 2020, followed by a 2021 deployment.
While both Nimitz and Ford-class aircraft carriers can operate with F-35Cs aboard, Navy spokesman Capt. Danny Hernandez said in an email, there are modifications to both carrier classes that are required in order to use all the data and information the F-35s can push out and receive, along with the addition of “additional classified spaces, some robustness of the ship for unique F-35 requirements (e.g. jet blast deflectors, etc.), but are not fundamental redesigns of any major components of the ship.”
Tabbed as the Navy’s first deployable F-35 air wing, Lemoore, Ca.-based VFA-147 Argonauts to deploy with the Vinson in 2021, accompanied by the Navy’s first squadron of Osprey tiltrotors, the Titans of Fleet Logistics Multi-Mission Squadron 30....
...Not building in F-35 capability on the first two ships “has always been the plan,” Hernandez said, adding F-35 capabilities will be built into the next two Ford carriers; the USS Enterprise slated to deploy in 2028 and the yet-to-be-named CVN 81, which will go to sea in 2032...."
Source: https://breakingdefense.com/2019/11/for ... -the-call/ 
08 Oct 2019, 07:29
