Northrop taking steps to keep carrier on budget
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N), mindful of cost overruns and delays on shipbuilding programs, says it is working hard with the U.S. Navy to keep costs in check on the newest U.S. aircraft carrier.
Northrop will lay the keel of the Gerald R. Ford, the first of a new class of aircraft carriers -- an enormous floating city that will be nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall -- at its Newport News shipyard on Saturday,
The Navy put the cost of research and development on the new ship at $3.6 billion plus $2.87 billion for detailed design work. The first ship, CVN 78, will cost $8.7 billion to build, excluding those costs, said Lieutenant Commander Victor Chen.
Mike Shawcross, Northrop vice president for the Ford-class carrier program, said the company had implemented several measures to beef up oversight and make sure the Navy clearly understood the production impact of any design changes.
"It gets down to really making sure, early on in the process, that each and every one that has a role in it -- in the shops, in material procurement, in assembly -- know what their expectations are and then holding them accountable to that," Shawcross said. He said work on any "first in class" ship posed a significant challenge.
He said Northrop had set up separate oversight processes for five separate functions within the construction team -- design, shops/manufacturing, ship assembly, services and support, to better track progress on the ship.
In addition, he said the use of a computer-based design model should help cut costs by helping workers better visualize what they were building; pick the most efficient sequence for assembly of separate components; and avert possible interference with other objects.
Northrop used the cyber design system on its DDG-1000 destroyer, and the LPD-17 amphibious ship, Shawcross said. He said the first use on a carrier was during the redesign of CVN-76 several years ago.
He said he was optimistic the new measures, and the strong relationship Northrop had developed with the Navy over the past eight years of working on the ship's design, would help keep the project on its cost and schedule targets.
One critical difference from past shipbuilding programs is that industry, the Navy and Congress, are far more attuned to the negative impact that even seemingly minor design changes can have on the cost of a ship.
The system adopted for the carrier would ensure that the Navy had a far better understanding of how their decisions could affect the production of the ship, Shawcross said.
He said using the computer-based design meant the company could also pre-cut, by machines, holes for miles of pipes that need to be installed, rather than doing it by hand in a labor-intensive and costly process.
All told, nearly 1,600 miles of cable and wiring will be installed on the ship, enough to reach from Newport News to Denver, if laid out end to end.
One congressional naval analyst said promises about keeping the carrier program on cost and schedule should be met with "a healthy degree of skepticism."
"Lead ship programs are historically very difficult to keep on cost and schedule," said the analyst, who was not authorized to speak on the record. He said the new carrier had already seen its costs grow by 5 to 10 percent during the design phase. Continued...
