Navy’s $13 Billion Carrier Needs Another $197 Million in Fixes

(Bloomberg) -- The Navy’s most expensive vessel is getting even costlier, as the service says it needs to add as much as $197 million more to correct deficiencies with the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier.

That includes completing the installation and certification of 11 elevators to lift munitions and other equipment from below decks that were supposed to be ready more than two years ago.

The previously undisclosed notification to Congress is on top of an extra $120 million identified in May 2018 to correct earlier deficiencies. The move last year caused the carrier to breach a $12.9 billion cost cap set by Congress in an effort to stop spiraling cost increases. The new request takes the carrier’s estimated cost to $13.22 billion.

The latest funding is needed “to correct deficiencies identified during testing to ensure the safety of the ship and personnel and to deliver an operational ship to the fleet,” Captain Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman, said in a statement.

The carrier got underway on Friday at Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc.’s facility in Newport News, Virginia, after 15 months of post-delivery work. It now begins as much as 18 months of additional at-sea verification tests. Four of the munitions elevators have been fully installed and turned over to the crew for testing.

More money also is needed to pay for “additional labor to address and correct technical issues, completing deferred work,” and “there are also time charges associated with a longer repair period,” the Pentagon comptroller said in an Oct. 7 document to Congress requesting permission for the Navy to shift $40 million from prior-year programs. The remaining $157 million would come from funds this fiscal year and 2021, Hernandez said.

The carrier was originally scheduled for delivery in 2013 with deployment expected around 2018, but that date may be a late as 2024, a top service officer acknowledged this week. It was delivered in May 2017.

“I think we are going to beat 2024 for sure,” the official, Vice Admiral Tom Moore, who heads the Naval Sea Systems Command, told a House Armed Services subcommittee on Tuesday.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert

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