THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, April 23, 1996 TAG: 9604230380
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER DINSMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
The big sky-blue crane at Newport News Shipbuilding lowered a 280-metric-ton piece of steel early Monday morning into the shipyard's biggest dry dock.
For the first time in nearly 20 years, the Peninsula shipyard was laying the keel of a commercial ship.
The double-hulled petroleum product tanker, to be called the Despotico, is the first of four being built for a Greek shipping line.
Named for an uninhabited Greek isle, the Despotico is the first large commercial ship to be built in a U.S. shipyard for a foreign buyer since 1957.
In addition to the four for Eletson Corp., Newport News Shipbuilding is building five of the tankers for a joint venture of Fort Lauderdale-based Hvide Marine Inc. and the U.S. arm of the Dutch shipping giant Van Ommeren N.V.
The big shipyard is getting back into commercial shipbuilding because the Navy, its principal customer of the past two decades, is buying fewer new warships since the end of the Cold War. The yard needs the commercial work to sustain its nearly 18,000 employees.
The shipyard cut the first steel for the Despotico in September. Since then, pieces of the hull have been being assembled in the shipyard's huge outfitting and assembly sheds. Now those pieces will start to come together on the floor of the vast Dry Dock No. 12 on the yard's north end. Fast, said William P. Fricks, the shipyard's president and chief executive. He said the pieces should start to resemble a ship in about a month.
The Despotico is being assembled behind the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman in the dry dock, the largest in the Western hemisphere. The Truman will be christened Sept. 14 and floated out of the dry dock.
The Despotico will follow two days later and should be ready for delivery by December.
To become more competitive for ship orders in the worldwide market, the shipyard is working to slash the time it takes from the first cut of steel to delivery to seven months from 14 months, Fricks said.
The section of keel laid Monday included the pump room, what Mike Keenan, the product tanker program's director, called ``the heart of the ship.''
Everything moved in to and out of the ship's tanks will be pumped through that room, which is a maze of pipes, valves and pumps. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Motoya Nakamura, The Virginian-Pilot
Newport News Shipbuilding lays the keel Monday for its double-hulled
tanker.
by CNB