USS Ford steams toward a possible war

WASHINGTON — The USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, has had a difficult few months at sea.

On Oct. 24, the Ford, with its 4,500 sailors, was redirected to the Caribbean Sea from a planned six-month European deployment. Then on Feb. 12, the Pentagon sent the ship to the Middle East as part of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Iran.

The Navy typically schedules ships for six-month deployments and tries to avoid having them go longer than seven. This week, however, the Ford marked its eighth month on deployment.

Members of the crew have told The New York Times that morale on the ship dipped after their deployment was first extended and has cratered since it was ordered to the Middle East.

At 1,106 feet long, the Ford is the Navy’s largest aircraft carrier. It was designed with new technologies that replaced steam and hydraulic systems for launching and recovering aircraft with electronic systems run by software.

But according to current and former Ford sailors, equipment problems limited the ship’s ability to carry out its most basic mission: sending warplanes into combat.

However, two senior Navy officials said Thursday that the Ford’s radars, catapults and arresting gear for recovering planes had been fixed.

This week, the Ford docked in Souda Bay off the Greek island of Crete, taking on supplies and ammunition and repairing broken equipment.

Here’s a look inside the warship:

4,500 sailors are the lifeblood of the ship.

The Ford was designed to need about 1,000 fewer sailors than its predecessors, bringing the number deployed aboard down to roughly 4,500.

But even with new technology, most of the jobs that sailors perform on the Ford are the same as on earlier carriers.

The ship still has nuclear propulsion engineers, sailors who run the machines that turn seawater into potable water, quartermasters who navigate, cooks who feed the crew, hull technicians who weld and fix sewage problems, aviation mechanics and dozens of other specialties.

According to the Navy, the Ford has “improved berthing compartments, better gyms and more ergonomic workspaces” for the crew as well.

Just below the flight deck is the Ford’s cavernous hangar bay.

There, sailors do maintenance on airplanes and helicopters in two separate bays that can be walled off from each other in case of a fire.

With Ford’s larger flight deck, the ship can carry 75 aircraft while its predecessors typically carry 70.

New features on the ship require advanced nuclear reactors.

The Navy had to design new kinds of nuclear reactors to generate more electricity for the Ford, to power systems that had been run by steam on earlier carriers.

The reactors installed on Ford create 25% more electrical power than earlier nuclear power plants on carriers, while requiring about half the number of sailors to run them, according to the Department of Energy.

Fighter jets are the key offensive weapons onboard.

The main offensive firepower on the Ford comes from four squadrons of F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters, which can carry a mix of guided bombs, rockets, and anti-ship and air-to-air missiles. A squadron of EA-18G Growler jets can carry out airstrikes as well.

The Ford, however, would need to be retrofitted to carry the Navy’s stealth warplane: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, whose design was finalized after the ship was completed.

Bombs are stowed onboard for combat missions.

The primary weapons for the Ford’s warplanes are Mark-80 series airdropped bombs in the 500-, 1,000- and 2,000-pound versions.

They contain the equivalent of 192 pounds, 445 pounds and 945 pounds of TNT high explosive.

Each bomb can be fitted with a laser- or GPS-guidance kit for more accurate delivery of the weapon.

Exactly how many of them Ford or any other carrier has in its magazines is classified.

As those munitions are used up in combat missions, carriers like the Ford can receive additional weapons from supply ships — either via trolleys that move along metal cables between the two ships, or suspended under helicopters ferrying loads.

An electromagnetic catapult is one of the Ford’s greatest technological advancements.

But the catapult, which launches aircraft, has also proved to be one of its biggest weaknesses.

Carriers of the past used steam generated by boilers or nuclear reactors to sling warplanes off their decks at speeds of more than 200 mph.

But current and former crew members have said that, as the first carrier outfitted with the new catapult system, the Ford has struggled to maintain both the hardware and the computer software that control it.

To keep the Ford’s catapults in operation, the Navy has cannibalized parts from the USS John F. Kennedy, a Ford-class carrier that is still under construction.

With a slightly larger flight deck than previous carriers, the Ford was supposed to be able to launch roughly 30% more sorties per day than its predecessors.

Problems with the electromagnetic system prevented the ship from reaching that level, according to current and former sailors. But a senior Navy official said Thursday that the Ford’s sortie rate had improved and now exceeds that of previous carriers.

This equipment helps planes safely land on the deck.

In another update to the decades-old technology used to “trap” warplanes landing on a carrier’s flight deck, the Ford debuted a modified version of a system first used by the Navy on land, calling it Advanced Arresting Gear.

Older carriers used a manually controlled hydraulic system to slow the planes down after their tailhooks caught one of the four wires stretched across the flight deck. But on the Ford, each wire is connected to devices under the flight deck called “water twisters” — liquid-filled turbines that can electronically adjust how much resistance they offer for heavier or lighter aircraft.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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