HMM: The Navy Obfuscates On Shock Testing The $13 Billion USS Ford.

The only certain tasks that the Navy mentioned about the USS Ford schedule were that flight ops were set to start in early 2020, and that the Navy was trying to work in repairs for the ships nine non-functional lower deck ammunition elevators–which get ammunition to and from weapons magazines–sometime during the next 18 months of at-sea testing, where they want to put in thousands of aircraft launches and recoveries, shaking the ship out.

Unfortunately, it did not sound as if the Navy was setting aside time to fit in a Full Ship Shock Trial (FSST), a vigorous test where explosives are detonated near a new Navy vessel to simulate near-misses in a battlefield environment.

If the USS Ford is not shocked–and the validity of the design is not tested–the shock trials will supposedly be shunted to to the future USS John F. Kennedy (CVN 79), the next Ford Class carrier, when most of the remaining Ford class aircraft carriers (CVNs 80, 81 and 82) will be too far along in their production cycle to incorporate many fixes.

The Navy does not appear to be confident that the USS Ford will absorb a shock trial without major damage. The organization has not hidden it’s desire to push shunt shock trials upon a later Ford variant, shocking the next Ford class carrier sometime in the 2024 to 2026 time-frame.

Not good.