DATE: Wednesday, October, 15, 1997          TAG: 9710140422

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A13  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Special Report: The Changing Face of the Navy Sailor 

SERIES: Future of the Fleet 

SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NEWPORT NEWS                      LENGTH:  162 lines

SHIPBUILDERS RETHINK THE CARRIER: MEETING GOALS OF FUTURE NAVY IS JOB 1

The slabs of steel lay on a dry dock's floor, skin the color of lima beans, lost in the bustle of grinds and squeals and swinging cranes, of jouncing trucks and hard-hatted yardhands above.

Early October at Newport News Shipbuilding, and the big yard is busy with commercial ships scattered along its 2 1/2-mile-long frontage on the James River. The metal in Dry Dock 12 shares the space with a commercial job, the Greek tanker Dhokos. Belly high and dry. Deck aswarm.

Overlooked by all, that jumble of steel, but for the people in a six-story brick cube a few railroad-carved blocks away. In that building's air-conditioned hush, necktied engineers polish their plans for the warship that the steel - and tens of thousands of tons more - will become.

Unrecognizable now, slabs and sections will join with uncountable others to create CVN-76, the Ronald Reagan, the ninth in the Navy's Nimitz class of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

Other engineers in the cube, recently dubbed the yard's Carrier Innovation Center, work on CVN-77, the flattop due to follow in 2008, now depicted in conceptual drawings that look more science fiction than fact.

Still others study options for the ship labeled ``CVX,'' which will come next - a ship that promises to rewrite the tried-and-true of decades and to muscle up the flexibility, stealthiness and striking power of these behemoths.

The Navy will decide what final form these future ships will take. But it is here - at the civilian yard that launched the first true American carrier in 1933, that built the active carriers Enterprise and John F. Kennedy, that gave birth to the entire Nimitz class - that some of the most fundamental thinking about next-generation aircraft carriers is taking place.

``It's a pretty doggone functional asset right now,'' Robert E. Davis, director of the center's Team CVX, said of the Navy's current carriers last week.

``But can we improve it?'' the former F-14 pilot and air wing commander asked. ``You bet.''

The carrier that will begin rising from Dry Dock 12 in February will be loaded with refinements over CVN-75, the Harry S. Truman, now undergoing final assembly two miles to the south.

The Reagan's ``island,'' or above-deck superstructure, will be streamlined. The ship will lack the antenna-studded mast that most modern carriers feature aft of the island. Its weapons elevator, a dumbwaiter that carries missiles and bombs to the flight deck from deep in the ship's gut, will be moved away from launching jets.

Below its waterline, it will differ substantially from its forebears: Bow will meet keel in a huge bulb aimed at stabilizing the ship's pitch, a feature present on many large commercial ships and some smaller Navy vessels.

And fiber-optic tendrils will snake through its thousands of spaces, replacing miles of hard-to-repair, easily overloaded copper wire.

That web of tubing is part of the Carrier Innovation Center's drive to ``build for life,'' to recognize the technological leaps that might occur in the Reagan's 50-year lifespan and ensure that they can be put to use with minimal fuss.

The as-yet-unnamed CVN-77, the ship following the Reagan, promises a quantum leap in ``build for life'' thinking. Planes might be shuttled between flight and hangar decks on a stern elevator that could double as a ``roll-on, roll-off'' ramp for tanks and trucks - important, in that a future carrier's work is sure to be enmeshed with that of Army, Air Force and Marine Corps units.

The island on this last ship of the Nimitz class might be far smaller than the Reagan's - might even become two stubby islands, their walls sloped and faceted to shrink their radar signature. Today's radar dishes, radio spires and cross-treed masts will be hidden inside the walls.

The landing runway, today angled off a carrier's port side, could run straight. That's because turning into the wind, which carriers must do to enable their planes to land, today creates a starboard crosswind - one more thing an already ``task-saturated'' Navy pilot must wrestle as he aims for the wire.

And the ship should include a host of refinements that would reduce its manning and maintenance costs: Smoother deck beams that could go years without repainting. Decktop jet blast deflectors of heat-resistant ceramic tile, far cheaper and more reliable than today's saltwater-cooled, metal models.

``I think it would be foolish to sit here and tell you about what hull configuration, what stealth technology will be in place,'' Davis said of the ship. ``But our motto around here for new ways of doing things is: `Earn your way onto CVN-77' - meaning, that if it doesn't make sense in manning reductions and/or cost savings, it's a non-starter.''

``In my mind, you have to bring three things to the next aircraft carrier,'' said retired Navy Rear Adm. Raynor A.K. Taylor, the innovation center's manager. ``You have to cut the cost. You have to boost the sortie rate, bomb delivery rate, turnover rate - they're all the same thing.

``And third - these are in no priority order - you have boost (computing power), so the next time we engage with the Air Force we can keep up with them, and we can keep up with our sons' computers back home.''

CVN-77 is, in the minds of the innovation center's engineers, a transition ship between the Nimitz class and CVX. It will be built on the hull of the former and, like its Nimitz sisters, will rely on nuclear reactors to produce the 280,000 horsepower required to shove it along at 30-plus knots.

It will employ steam-powered catapults, as American carriers have since the advent of jets.

One can make few safe assumptions about CVX, however. ``The Nimitz class was designed in the mid- to late '60s, and they fought the ship a certain way in the mid- to late '60s,'' noted Mario P. Doreste, a naval programs manager at the center.

``We've made incremental changes to each of the Nimitz class ships during the program - the John C. Stennis involved 1,400 changes - but the way the Navy fights can change over 30 years.''

Thus, CVX could be new from the keel up; in fact, some innovation center drawings depict it as an enormous trimaran, the spaces between its hulls big enough to provide haven for smaller vessels.

It could be, Taylor said, that its interior will be modular, so that as the ship ages, its computer-driven nerve centers might be unplugged as entire rooms, trucked out of the stern, and replaced with plug-in newer models.

Whatever form it finally takes will be, to a large degree, the brainchild of the center's experts, some of whom study nothing but catapult technology, others who specialize in materials movement, others who study propulsion, flight deck design, communications, stealth technology.

One, J. Michael Sowder, spends his days mulling how to drive a 100,000-ton carrier without nuclear power - a development that might, because it could eliminate the ship's boilers, also force the replacement of the steam catapult.

``We think they're probably going to stay with nuclear power,'' Taylor said of the Navy. ``And we think they're probably going to stay with steam catapults.'' He shrugged. ``But we're not sure.''

Another engineer, Gary L. Good, is working on robots to lift missiles and attach them to planes, and to trim flight deck personnel. ``We can be using the technology not only to move weapons,'' he noted, ``but parts of airplanes, crates of Worcestershire sauce, frozen chicken patties.''

Another, Rich Johnson, has conducted workshops with naval aviators to glean their thoughts on good and bad flight deck designs. The carrier they most favored, he learned, was the now-retired America - its deck was 6 feet wider at the bow than most flattops, offering more parking space.

The result: CVX - and to a lesser extent, CVN-77 - may well have a wider flight deck up front.

Among the assumptions one cannot make about CVX - and can only nervously make about CVN-77 - is that it will be built at all.

A carrier, after all, is enormously expensive: CVN-77 is slated to cost $4.6 billion to $5.2 billion. For all that, its offensive punch is limited to the bombs and missiles that can be delivered by roughly half of the 80 planes in its air wing. And it is an inviting target, concentrating in one hull thousands of American lives, millions of gallons of jet fuel and mountains of explosives.

Those weaknesses have not gone unnoticed. Literary broadsides on carriers have become fashionable in the past few years, the most visible recent attack coming from retired Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom in the July/August 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs. It is an ``indisputable fact,'' Odom wrote, that ``a carrier-based aircraft is the most expensive way to deliver a bomb to a target.''

``When aircraft could fly at most 300 miles round-trip, floating airports made sense,'' he wrote. ``Today, when fighters and strategic bombers can fly across the oceans in less than a day, the case for carriers is weak.''

The Carrier Innovation Center's staff remains bullish.

``As far as I'm concerned, the aircraft carrier brings striking power and staying power,'' Team CVX's Davis said last week.

``With a carrier, you're not going to get airplanes to where they need to be 36 hours later. You're not going to get them 24 hours later. You're going to get them right now, often within five minutes off the deck.

``And as far as being a goodwill ambassador, you can't touch it,'' he said of the largest warships to ever take to sea. ``It's practically a 51st state.''

Outside the window and across the yard, in the shadow of the sky-blue crane straddling Dry Dock 12, the first ship of the carrier's evolving future waited. KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY SERIES

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