Critics say
Trump does not understand the benefits of working through EMALS and
advanced arresting gear engineering challenges. The problems are not
insurmountable, and McGrath is confident the Navy and General Atomics
will figure it out.
“Thirty years from now, other navies will build these ships with
electromagnetic launch-and-recovery systems,” McGrath says. “We’re far
from throwing in the towel on this, and the suggestion from the
commander-in-chief that we [do so] . . . is unwise, and it is sort of
reminiscent of this impetuous nature in general.”
The service is completing launch bulletins for a variety of aircraft,
Navy Capt. Kenneth Sterbenz, aircraft launch and recovery equipment
program manager at Naval Air Systems Command, tells Aviation Week.
“For shipboard operations, those launch bulletins will tell the ship at a
very high level what’s required wind over deck—in other words, how much
headwind is needed for the specific aircraft at that specific weight of
launch,” Sterbenz says. An advantage of EMALS over the steam catapult is
that the Navy can more precisely manage all those factors to launch an
aircraft from the flight deck. The recovery bulletins are the inverse to
arrest an aircraft, he says.
Sterbenz’s team is incorporating the lessons learned from the at-sea test
period conducted by the service roughly one year ago. When asked about
failures between cycle times, he says the at-sea sample set is much
smaller compared to the 3,800 launches and more than 2,000 arrestments the
Navy has conducted at its land-based test site in New Jersey.
In the fourth quarter of this calendar year, the Ford will have the
launch bulletins and the latest software and hardware, he says.
“The main difference I’m getting to appreciate between the two systems is
with the EMALS, you start with a known condition at 0 kt., and you know
where to get that aircraft to, whatever its speed,” Sterbenz says.
The Navy reached an agreement in December with Huntington Ingalls
Industries Newport News Shipbuilding to purchase two aircraft carriers at
the same time—the USS Enterprise (CVN 80) and CVN 81. This is an
opportunity for the service to make modifications to subsystem design
because the Enterprise will not begin construction until 2020.
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