USS Kennedy Surges Toward Operational Status by 2027
Kris Osborn
The famous and now operational USS Ford, the Navy’s first-in-class breakthrough carrier, took 12 years to assemble. The first steel was cut in 2005, and the ship was commissioned for operational service in 2017. Now the USS Kennedy is surging toward operational life in 2027
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by Kris Osborn, Warrior
Pipe assemblies, cabling, shafts, rudders and struts are just a few of the small parts of a massive aircraft carrier which need to be organized and built into a large, extremely complex integrated design …..to bring an aircraft carrier to life. The famous and now operational USS Ford, the Navy’s first-in-class breakthrough carrier, took 12 years to assemble. The first steel was cut in 2005, and the ship was commissioned for operational service in 2017, a difficult process not without years of budgetary, technological and scheduling challenges.
Now the USS Kennedy is surging toward operational life in 2027, and HII has been moving faster with the second Ford-class carrier because builders have leveraged new construction techniques emerging from lessons learned building the USS Ford. Newport News Shipbuilders, a division of HII, has been moving forward for many years now with a process builders call “modular construction” wherein ship compartments are assembled together before moving them to the dock to expedite the building process. Smaller segments of the ship are welded together into a structural “superlift,” a process designed to advance construction before the ship is lifted up into drydock.
https://warriormaven.com/news/sea/uss-kennedy-surges-toward-operational-status-by-2027
