– Money Well Spent? Pentagon’s $13 Billion Carrier Struggles to Carry Aircraft:
The US Navy’s first Ford-class carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, just entered service and is already having trouble catching the F/A-18 Super Hornets landing on the carrier’s deck, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
The Navy claims the problems with landing the planes have been fixed, but another issue that’s perhaps more important remains unresolved: Super Hornets with full tanks of fuel cannot launch from the carrier, either, “a handicap that could limit their effectiveness in combat,” Bloomberg noted.
Reworking the landing systems forced the Navy to spend more than three times what it had budgeted for the mechanism, according to documents obtained by the news service. The final expenditure of $961 million blew the expected outlay of $301 million out of the water.
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H/t reader squodgy.
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