Joanna Crews
A shipbuilding business of Huntington Ingalls Industries has reached a 70-percent completion milestone on the structural work for a future Ford-class aircraft carrier.
Newport News Shipbuilding has assembled 317 lifts for the USS John F. Kennedy nuclear-powered aircraft carrier since the keel laying in August 2015, HII said Thursday.
The company expects a total of 447 lifts to complete the ship designated CVN 79 for launch by 2020.
CVN 79 is under construction at the company’s Dry Dock 12 in Newport News, which uses a 1,050-metric-ton gantry crane to bring together structures called superlifts in order to build the whole ship.
HII said the shipyard employed the same modular construction method for the first-in-class USS Gerald R. Ford or CVN 78.
The company added it recently completed an 806-metric-ton, 171-foot-long and 92-foot-wide superlift that is comprised of 17 individual sections and features berthing areas, electrical equipment rooms and workshops.
