THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511260066
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 164 lines
NORFOLK, Nov. 26, 2015 - In sea trials off the Virginia capes this week, some of the Navy's best sailors and airmen are beginning a new era for aircraft carriers and carrier aviation.
Old hands can't quite believe what they see:
Where a catapult once hurled jets off the bow, there is a ramp, sort of like a ski jump. Planes roll down the deck under their own power, head up the ramp and into the air. Down toward the stern, the ship's control tower - island to sailors - sits in the middle rather than on the starboard side of the deck. Planes take off and land simultaneously on parallel runways straddling the island; the newest jets come in so slowly and gently that they have no need for a tailhook or arresting cables to bring them to a halt . . .
The brainstorming of shipbuilders, aircraft designers, admirals and pilots is beginning to point the Navy toward a future that could include such a carrier.
``Our sheet of paper is still pretty much blank,'' said Rear Adm. Harry T. Rittenour, who as the Navy's director of carrier and air station programs is leading the service's early planning for a new generation of carriers.
His only firm prediction is that the new carrier will be ``a ship with a flat top on it.''
The early thinking includes consideration of large, parallel-runway ships and smaller carriers that would be the home of a new generation of ``jump jet'' fighters. There's also been talk of a carrier with a pair of angled runways arranged in a ``V,'' and carrier islands that are shorter and more rounded - the better to trick enemy radars into seeing the ship as an oil tanker.
Adm. William Owens, who will retire early next year as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocates partial replacement of the carrier fleet with giant, floating air bases to be positioned and more or less permanently anchored in hot spots like the Persian Gulf or off the North Korean coast.
The planning, beginning up to two decades before the first of the new carriers would go into service, has enormous implications for the nation's military. The abandonment of most of America's overseas land bases has increased the importance of carriers as the centerpiece of the nation's first response to crises.
``In the world situation we see ourselves pointing to, the carrier or sea power may be the only thing that's in a trouble spot in the first 10 days,'' Rittenour said.
The carrier planning also could be critical to the economic future of Hampton Roads. Carrier contracts, now running about $5 billion each, are the lifeblood of the region's largest private employer, Newport News Shipbuilding. The yard and its 19,000 workers now enjoy a monopoly on the work.
At least one option the Navy is weighing would threaten that monopoly by abandoning nuclear power for carrier propulsion. Newport News' nuclear expertise - just one other U.S. yard is nuclear-capable and it builds only submarines - has protected it from competition on contracts for all 10 nuclear carriers in the fleet or under construction.
The Navy wants Newport News to build one more nuclear carrier - now designated CVN-77 - early in the next century. It will be the last ship in the Nimitz class but also could provide a platform for testing of catapult technologies, electronic systems and other innovations that would be used in a new carrier generation.
``There are opportunities to capture technology in this ship that will allow us to point to the future,'' Rittenour said.
Nuclear reactors are still ``the leading option'' for powering carriers beyond CVN-77, Adm. Mike Boorda, the chief of naval operations, told reporters last month, but their huge cost may dictate a shift toward the turbines.
Ronald O'Rourke, who analyzes military spending programs for the Congressional Research Service, said the use of nuclear power adds several hundred million dollars, perhaps as much as $1 billion, to the cost of a carrier.
But the nuclear ships, unlike those that run on fossil fuel, can go up to 30 years between refuelings and steam continuously for weeks at high speeds. Rittenour notes that reactors also are a ``dense'' power source, taking up relatively little space in the ship and making more room available for planes, equipment and people.
``Much more than just acquisition costs'' is involved in the decision on whether to use nuclear power, agreed Mike Shawcross, director of naval marketing at Newport News. For example, a gas turbine plant large enough to power a carrier would need an extensive system of exhaust vents, he said.
Whatever power plant the Navy chooses probably will have little impact on the overall size of the post-Nimitz ship. Rittenour suggests that the Navy expects carriers to continue carrying air wings of about 70 planes and so will require a flight deck and hangar deck comparable in size to those of current carriers. That would mean a ship with an overall length of about 1,000 feet and displacement of around 100,000 tons.
But the Pentagon's long-term plan to develop a new generation strike fighter for use by both the Navy and the Air Force could have an enormous impact on the look of the ship.
That plane, now known only as JAST (for Joint Attack Strike Technology), is expected to be capable of short takeoffs and landings, using a ramp at the end of the runway.
Retired Rear Adm. George E. Jessen of Virginia Beach, who spent much of his career in aeronautical engineering positions, recalled that the Navy tested ski jump launches as early as 1980. Ramps with inclines of 3 degrees, 6 degrees, and 9 degrees were tested at Patuxtent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, he said, and ``showed that there was a significant reduction in the takeoff roll'' of planes like the F/A-18 Hornet.
The tests were completed by the mid-1980s, Jessen said, but nothing was done because ``we were buying more carriers as-is,'' and the flush defense budgets of the era reduced the incentive to make innovations.
``We got committed to these big-deck carriers . . . it just happens to be our culture,'' agreed retired Adm. John J. Shanahan, director of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington-based think tank. ``We were committed to these things and the expense of redesigning flight decks, redesigning ramps .
Because new carriers also will carry the F/A-18 ``Super Hornet'' that McDonnell-Douglas is now building for the Navy, at least one catapult runway will remain, Rittenour said. The catapults it uses could be different from the steam-driven slingshots on current ships, however; the Navy is looking at electromagnetic-power and internal combustion engines, among other things, as possible catapult drivers.
The JAST plane also is expected be capable of a higher rate of sorties than the F-14 Tomcats and the F/A-18 Hornets now in the Navy's arsenal, a change that could effect the shape of the carrier deck and the way planes are arranged on it.
Rittenour said the Navy is looking for ways to set up the deck so that planes that have flown relatively short missions can be turned around and sent back into battle almost immediately.
``In his mind, the pilot knows what's going on in the target area, because he's been there,'' Rittenour said. ``So he comes in, his next mission has already been planned for him. Something plugs into the side of the airplane and he gets an update right there, whether it's a video presentation or an actual briefing. And at the same time, data points are being loaded into his computer. The weapons have already been selected for him and the ship is somehow set up to support that, and he's being refueled at the same time.''
Jessen suggested that whatever changes in the deck are required by JAST, the new carriers should be designed with flexibility in mind.
``You can't forecast with great integrity what requirements you might have even five years down the road,'' he said. ``So I would think there's some advantage to having a future carrier that has appropriate consideration for the resident air wing and some consideration for other aircraft that might temporarily utilize the deck.''
Shanahan agreed. ``Before we decide on the design of ships way down the line, we ought to try to figure out the nature of warfare in that time frame, which of course is a daunting task,'' he said. ILLUSTRATION: Graphics
John Earle/The Virginian-Pilot
THE CARRIER EVOLVES
THE NEXT GENERATION?
SOURCE: U.S. Navy
[For complete graphical information, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY AIRCRAFT CARRIERS CHRONOLOGY by CNB