Imagine, you’re part of the crew of the newest, biggest, and strongest US Navy Aircraft Carrier and you’ve almost completed all the acceptance trials. But wait, there’s more! Specifically a 3.9-magnitude earthquake of a shock trial, courtesy of thousands of pounds of explosives. And you get to enjoy the ride.
The last time that happened was in 2021 when the USS Gerald R Ford (CVN-78) completed its acceptance trials in the Atlantic Ocean to simulate how the ship would perform in battle conditions. Wired with sensors to measure the effects of the shock, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) was hit with the blast about 100 miles off the Florida coast just before 4 p.m. on a Friday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey that registered the blast as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake.
The first-in-class aircraft carrier was designed using advanced computer modeling methods, testing, and analysis to ensure the ship is hardened to withstand battle conditions, and these shock trials provide data used in validating the shock hardness of the ship. The last aircraft carrier to execute FSST was USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) in 1987.
Ford commanding officer Capt. Paul Lanzilotta told USNI News in March aboard the carrier that the crew had been busy preparing for the event. “That’s quite a bit of work when you have a ship with 5,000 spaces in it, so we have to prepare all of our gear,” he said. “We’re also going to prepare the crew: so the crew has to know what to expect, they need to practice their damage control procedures because that’s something that we all need to be good at, and when we shock the ship we need to make sure that we have the ship in as ready a condition as we can.”
So you prepare all those months, you go through all the tests and then, it’s like a video game you get the final boss test!
Being first isn’t all it’s cracked up to be sometimes and I’ve got some work to do if I want to test gear that hard!
Garfield out.
