Loading bombs on Navy jets aboard aircraft carriers and moving
them to the flight deck is so labor intensive that a typical resupply
job requires on average 400 sailors.
Automation technologies apparently have not helped the Navy in
this arena, noted Rear Adm. Dennis M. Dwyer, program executive officer
for aircraft carriers. “We haven’t made a lot of progress
in this since World War II,” he said.
It’s no secret that the fastest way to cut the cost of operating
ships is to downsize the workforce. On aircraft carriers, 50 percent
of the expense is tied to people costs, Dwyer explained during a
technology conference sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.
He told the audience of contractors and scientists that his office
needs technologies that reduce the “total ownership cost”
of carriers. Such money-saving technologies ideally would automate
the arduous tasks of loading ammunition on aircraft and moving heavy
equipment, said Dwyer. “Loading bombs and getting them to
the flight deck takes 400 people every time we move ordnance to
the flight deck.”
Dwyer also is interested in products that can combat corrosion
and improve coatings for non-skid surfaces.
Corrosion is a maintenance nightmare aboard carriers. Each of the
Navy’s 12 carriers has 14 million square feet of deck and
surface that require anti-corrosion protection, as well as hundreds
of tanks. “Last year, we spent $230 million battling corrosion
in tanks,” said Dwyer. “I need coatings that stand up
to the environment and last a long time, so I don’t have to
reapply coatings on tanks.”
Applying non-skid surfaces on flight decks creates further maintenance
headaches for carrier crews. “Non-skid surfaces are one of
our biggest problems,” Dwyer said. It costs a million dollars
to apply a non-skid surface on a flight deck. For that money, “I’d
like to get 10,000 landings out of a non-skid on a flight deck.”
Only 1,500 landings are achieved today. Because coatings are temperature
sensitive, the heat creates loose non-skid that becomes FOD (foreign
object debris), a safety hazard of sorts on a flight deck. “We
do FOD walks four times a day to look for loose non-skid,”
said Dwyer. “We are looking for a leap in technology.”
Rear Adm. Jay M. Cohen, chief of naval research, said that composite
materials will go a long way to make ships easier to maintain and
more resistant to damage.
During the past two years, he said, “one of my biggest fights
has been to try to get our shipbuilding industry to accept advanced
composite materials and procedures. ... You want to go to composites
for low ownership cost, low magnetic signature, strength, flexibility
of design.”
Composite materials are expensive, however. Cohen estimated that
a composite ship costs up to 10 times more than a steel ship. The
price would go down once it was mass-produced, he added.