John F. Kennedy (CVN 79) in Dry Dock 12.
Photo by Chris Oxley courtesy of HHI.
Putting the Plan in Place Once a particular lift is on the ship, shipfitters and welders get to work aligning plates and welding them together. “We have to get a significant amount of weld into most of those joints before we can put another superlift on top of that or adjacent to it,” said Hummel. “It should also be noted that we have a vigorous crane operations program under Dave that is, in my opinion, close to world-class.”
To put Newport in perspective from an operational standpoint, the 450 or so lifts they’ll perform on the Kennedy project represent a mere sliver of the approximately 955,000 lifts they’ll execute across the entire company and product lines this year. Inevitably, the CVN 79 will enjoy the title of world’s largest combat ship upon official delivery in 2022. Ten million feet of electrical cable will snake through its workings—joined by four million feet of fiber optic cable—all of it awash beneath the gleam of 200,000 gallons of paint spread across 1,106 feet from stern to bow. It will hold more than 80 combat aircraft—with the capacity for up to 90—and house within its walls, and among its 5,000-person crew, a dizzying accompaniment of additional facts and figures. But that’s still five years away—between which plenty of meticulous, highly organized work still awaits in the Newport News Shipbuilding yard. “We’re in a heavy structural assembly and moderate system perspective build right now,” said Hummel. “As we get through the structural erection, we’ll transition more into system completion, and that will happen maybe a year before launch. Ten we transition into a heavy system completion and test orientation as well as a compartment completion and turnover in 2020—where the Navy starts accepting the ship piece by piece, space by space, system by system.” <
Tis article was originally published in the March/April 2017 issue of Wire Rope Exchange. For more information, visit www.
huntingtoningalls.com.
26
DECEMBER – JANUARY 2018
INDUSTRIAL LIFTING EXCHANGE
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