US Navy runs into snags with aircraft carrier's electric plane-slingshot

Gerald "Fumble" Ford....another Warren Commission Whitewasher....

"Did Geo H W Bush Coordinate a JFK Hit Team" at Veterans Today....

Maybe the Ford is haunted by evil history....

Re: civil servants

There is a notion in the industry that there are two types of civil servants who deal with defence procurement. There are the incompetent ones who let suppliers get away with anything, er, through being incompetent.

And there are the competent ones who let suppliers get away with anything in the hope of landing well-paying jobs in the private sector.

Re: We all need less stress...

Sounds like it's turned up to 11 and all they need to do is turn it down a notch or two...

Re: We all need less stress...

Maybe because the system came from rail gun technology, they never thought about being able to launch a projectile with less force so never fully developed that side of the control system.

Was Gerald Ford the clumsy president? I think he had a reputation for falling down plane steps and bumping into things, a bad augur for a ship best to avoid iceberg alley.

Re: We all need less stress...

I was going to ask the same thing.

FWIW "excess stress" was a major problem on early steam catapaults until they got it right. Pulling the nosewheel off doesn't help launches much.

The clue might be in the other part: EMALS could not "readily" be electrically isolated for maintenance,

Meaning that someone's skimped in the deployed design.

Re: We all need less stress...

A steam piston would rely on dump valves to release the steam into the driver channel, and that would allow a few fractions of a second for the aircraft to begin to roll forward before the full force hits. A linear accelerator would go to full power instantly. Seems to me the solution would be to dual-circuit the thing...have lower power to the first few paces of the launch run, literally getting the ball rolling, then a transfer to the full power run for the actual launch phase. Relative to the ship (ergo, the catapult) the aircraft is at rest, and overcoming that inertia-at-rest creates the stressing element. Or use some outside method to overcome the starting inertia...perhaps auxiliary rails to pull the main gear in addition to the nose gear for the first bit, then they release for the traditional nose-gear-only launch system to do the rest.

As for the maintenance problem, steam catapults took up a lot of room - realistically, it should be possible to place two catapult systems where there used to be one, so there would be four at the waist position, #2 just slightly inboard of #1, and #4 just inboard of #3. Set them up as pairs...1 and 3 are active, 2 and 4 can be worked on. In a big push, alternate pairs, no need to wait for systems to reset or be checked...launch 1, then 3, load aircraft onto 2 and 4,and launch them while 1 and 3 are reset and systems checks run. Could also be a form of future-proofing - 1 and 2 could be joined to launch extra-heavy aircraft. Costly? Yes, but this is an aircraft carrier. Its going to be expensive anyway. If you cheap out today, the Navy will want new toys in 10 years. Give them a little extra now, maybe they'll be happy with these for 11 years. Meanwhile, the Air Force will be demanding shiny new stuff too.

Re: We all need less stress...

"I'm curious why there is apparently less control for a linear motor than a steam piston."

Curiously, the steam valve that was fitted to the electric catapult (as per military regulations regarding carrier catapults) had no effect controlling the motor's performance. ☺

Re: We all need less stress...

Agreed, maybe the problem is actually in the design of the F35s airframe in that it can't take the stress of a catapult when fully loaded?

Re: We all need less stress...

Could go on for days about all that is wrong about EMALS. Answer to your question is that a typical F18 launch requires 3 megawatts of power delivered over a three second time span. This power is stored in 3 ea 80,000 pound (Lb) motor generators per catapult as rotational kinetic energy.

As the launch progresses, the available power drops off rapidly and the acceleration of the aircraft drops drops rapidly. Thus a fairly high initial rate of aceleration ( + 5G??)is required and the launched aircraft experiences a high accelerational stress. Launching the above F18 with wing tanks causes damage to the wing structure. By the way, the 3 80,000 pound motor generators require an additional 20,000 pounds each of structure, plus control electronics and very heavy cabling in three large compartments. This does not count the large steam driven turbogenerators and the heat exchangers to convert the reactor thermal energy to steam. Efficiency EMALS = 9%, steam cats = 40%.

Re: Weapons ready?

Rumor has it that they considered stripping HMS Victory of her 32-pdrs and mounting them. A bit more advanced weaponry than catapults, etc.

Re: Weapons ready?

I believe the whole affair is somewhat more Machiavellian than that, and a lot more tragic. What if the UK had gone for EMALS? Rolls Royce make the lift fan for the B variant. This would have been a big loss for them. Without the need for a STOVOL plane the purchase options open up. We would have the absurd state where we had one make of fighter deployed on carriers and a completely different one on land, but where there was a perfectly suitable non-carrier variant. The Typhoon, which is already looking something of a sick joke, would look totally absurd. Slow death Typhoon.

But wait, things get worse. The justification for buying only two carriers rather than the three required to be able to always have at least one available is the ability to "inter operate" with the French. That is now lost. The F35 B cannot take off vertically with any meaningful weapons or fuel load.

Hang on, It gets worse still. A carrier group is very vulnerable as we found out in the South Atlantic. AWACS coverage is absolutely essential. There is no ski jump AWACS, so no safe operation away from ground based AWACS.

As to the cost of redesign I simply do not believe a word of it. This whole thing is a BAE Systems stitch up.