U.S. Navy Commits $418 Million to Elevator Maintenance
In a release accompanied by a photo of first-in-class carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, Huntington Ingalls Industries announced Tuesday that it has received a $418 million contract for the purpose of elevator maintenance in the U.S. Navy's flat-top fleet. The five-year contract applies to the Nimitz-class, the Ford-class and the Navy's elevator-equipped amphibs.
"Ensuring that essential operational systems — including shipboard elevators — run reliably is central to meeting the readiness needs of our U.S. sailors and Marines," said Michael Lempke, president of HII Mission Technologies’ Global Security group. "We look forward to applying four decades of Elevator Support Unit experience to safeguard the performance of these systems."
The funds will cover sailor training to improve crewmembers' ability to fix their own elevators, along with fly-away teams of contractors who can attend the ship anywhere in the world and complete complex repairs that servicemembers can't do themselves.
The best-known recipient of elevator repair service in the fleet is USS Gerald R. Ford, a $13 billion first-in-class carrier that carries a host of new technologies. Ford's weapons elevators are of a novel electromagnetic design, which was not fully matured on land before installation and proved to be problematic in a shipboard environment. Out of 11 elevator units, none were functioning at the time of Ford's delivery in 2017, and it took a team of the Navy's best experts four years to rebuild and "commission" the elevators one by one.
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In 2021, then-CNO Adm. Mike Gilday described the long process of fixing Ford's elevators as "painful." "We really shouldn’t introduce more than maybe one or two new technologies on any complex platform like that in order to make sure we keep risk at a manageable level," he said at the time.
HII is the Navy's sole builder of aircraft carriers and amphibs, and performs most of the maintenance and modernization work as well.