The Pentagon’s chief weapons evaluator said that an early assessment of CVN-78 found that the aircraft carrier’s sortie generation might be worse than the Nimitz class it is going to replace.
The Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation listed four critical components that may have reliability issues.
Land-based testing of the electromagnetic catapult system found that it fails after 240 launches, at this stage the system should have been functioning at 1250 launches without failures.
The advanced arresting gear is not doing better, it fails after 20 landings.
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So was this a problem with the electromagnetic launch system design or a materials of construction issue or an integration issue or a power issue? Any one of those could be the failure mode.
How many tests were run before they put it on an all-up seagoing carrier? I guess smaller scale test rigs at sea were out of the question due to the budget situation. (I could be wrong though, I just hadn’t heard of any, and probably if there were I still wouldn’t have heard of them as a civilian for obvious reasons)
I guess they could install conventional arresting gear, a la the Nimitz class, but redoing the catapults would be a lot tougher. Here’s hoping they beat the bugs.