Special

Jan 07, 2024

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The last Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is under construction in Newport News. View the work in progress, a rare glimpse behind the gates.

Stories by Peter Dujardin Photos by Adrin Snider, Joe Fudge

Page 5 – BUILDING THE GEORGE H.W. BUSH: INTRODUCTION / CONTENTS

An Amazing Journey

Shipyard design manager Mike Smith pauses his small tour at the bottom of the largest drydock at Northrop Grumman Newport News. Directly overhead presses more than 50,000 tons of steel, the hull of a nearly finished aircraft carrier propped on 400 keel blocks — three foot high concrete pads topped with planks.

Crouching, Smith jokes: "If it moves, you won't even know."

From that angle, the hull of the carrier George H.W. Bush looks more like the base of a large building than the bottom of a sleek warship. It's a sight not many people see — not even most of the thousands of workers who have labored on the ship during the past six years in advance of the Oct. 7 christening.

Based on unprecedented access to the shipyard for the past six months, this special section takes the rest of us under, over, inside and out, to tell the story of the 10th and last Nimitz-class carrier — and some of the workers building it.

Carrier's namesake: Know your Bush George Herbert Walker Bush joined the Navy on his 18th birthday, June 12, 1942, and became the youngest U.S. naval aviator in the Pacific during World War II.

Bush flew 58 combat missions in 1944. During one of those, on Sept. 2, 1944, Bush piloted an aircraft that attacked the Japanese installations on Chi Chi Jima.

Bush's aircraft was hit and his engine caught fire. He completed his attack and released the bombs over his target. With his engine on fire, he flew several miles before he and one other crewmember on the TBM Avenger bailed out and were rescued by a submarine.

Pre-presidency Bush attended Yale and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948 with a degree in economics.

After working in the oil business, he ran for a U.S. Senate seat and lost. Then he ran for the House of Representatives, was re-elected, then lost a second senate bid to Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr.

He later became U.N. ambassador, envoy to China and CIA director. In 1979, Bush ran for the Republican nomination but later agreed to be Ronald Reagan's vice presidential candidate, serving two terms.

Presidency Bush was inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, 1989. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 provided Bush's most serious crisis, but he fashioned an international coalition against Iraq. In a ground war in 1989, lasting just 100 hours, allied forces drove the Iraqis from Kuwait.

Post-presidency In 2005, President George W. Bush named his father and former President Bill Clinton to lead a nationwide campaign to help the victims of Asian tsunamis. After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the two formed the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to raise funds to assist the recovery effort.

True or False?

You can test your knowledge by taking the quiz throughout this section. Warning: You have to know your carriers.

True. But don't worry if you miss a few answers. By the end of this book, you’ll be smarter for trying.

Page 8 – Chapter 1 – BUILDING THE GEORGE H.W. BUSH: END OF AN ERA

What was it, exactly, that led to the end of the Cold War? The collapse of the Soviet Union's economic system? A spirit of cooperation led by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev? President Ronald Reagan's missile buildup?

Brian Persons, civilian executive director of the Naval Sea Systems Command's carrier building program has another reason: the Nimitz-class ships.

"The Soviet Union tried to emulate it, and weren't able to succeed," Persons said. "They were never able to deploy a battle group around the world. It is the one war-fighting platform that really shaped the events."

The design of the USS Nimitz began in 1964, and the 10-ship class has lasted longer than previous classes.

"The Nimitz class … represents the largest number of carriers of any type of any nation built to the same basic design since World War II," according to Norman Polmar, author of "The Naval Institute's Guide to the Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Naval Fleet." He termed the Nimitz's longevity "a remarkable and probably unique life span for a warship design."

The USS Nimitz was commissioned in 1975, and the George H.W. Bush — the last of the ships — will be deactivated in 2059, after 50 years of service.

That's a possible 84 years of the same basic design on the seas.

The Nimitz class borrowed from previous carriers. The flight deck layout is essentially unchanged from the USS Kitty Hawk and John F. Kennedy. But the Nimitz ships — because they don't need to carry oil for fuel — can carry more aviation fuel and munitions.

The Nimitz wasn't the first nuclear-powered carrier. That was the the USS Enterprise. The carriers have been able to accommodate everything from Vietnam-era planes to today's F/A-18s and figure to handle next-generation planes such as the Joint Strike Fighter and unmanned planes.

The new carrier class, the CVN-78, will make dramatic gains on the Nimitz, particular in requiring fewer sailors.

The CVN-78's more efficient reactor will produce more electricity. That will eliminate maintenance-intensive steam-driven parts, such as current catapults have. Longer-lasting electric components will be used instead. But the same hull form will endure, and the ships still will be coming in for service for more than 50 years.

"A lot of its legacy is being carried over," Persons said. "This is not the end."

Page 9 – Chapter 1 – BUILDING THE GEORGE H.W. BUSH: END OF AN ERA

• Some of the most complex pieces of machinery known to man have been rising on the banks of the James River for more than four decades — and driving the local economy in the process.

• Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, a nuclear-powered group of warships, are the centerpiece of the last remaining superpower's Navy. And the Newport News shipyard, off Washington and Huntington avenues, has made them all. It's the nation's only carrier builder — and one of only two makers of nuclear vessels.

• On Oct. 7, the 10th and last of the Nimitz ships — the George H.W. Bush — will be christened. Though construction continues another two years, the event marks the occasion when the ship floats for the first time and gets named as a bottle of sparkling wine strikes its hull.

About the shipyard

Northrop Grumman Newport News, with 19,000 workers, is the region's largest private employer. Founded in 1886 by Collis P. Huntington as a sidelight to his coal operations, the Newport News yard has produced ships that served in World War I, World War II, the Cold War and all wars since. Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman bought the yard in 2001.

Over the past six years, 12,000 shipyard workers — up to 4,500 at any one time — have helped build the carrier.

Besides the Bush, the yard is building and overhauling submarines; designing the next generation carrier; refueling and overhauling the carrier Carl Vinson.

Last of its Kind. The George H.W. Bush rises in Dry Dock 12 at the shipyard. Photo by Adrin Snider/Daily Press

True or False?

Chester Nimitz was the first pilot to fly off the deck of a Navy ship.

False. The first was Eugene B. Ely, who in 1910 flew his biplane off a deck on the USS Birmingham in Hampton Roads. Adm. Chester Nimitz led Pacific forces during World War II.

Page 10 – Chapter 1 – BUILDING THE GEORGE H.W. BUSH: END OF AN ERA

It was just before the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975 when Giao Phan fled her homeland.

The war was in its last days after the U.S. withdrawal, and North Vietnam was overrunning the South.

Phan, then 15, fled with her mother and seven siblings for Guam. They went to Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base in California, then to Northern Virginia. But her father, Tung Phan, a general in the South Vietnamese Army, stayed behind with his troops.

He told his wife he would kill himself before being captured by the North.

Days went by. Then weeks. Still no word. The Phans feared the worst.

Then Tung Phan called on the phone. He had been airlifted out the day of the surrender to a Navy ship in the Pacific. Soon, he was on his way to Northern Virginia.

"Big relief!" said Giao Phan, near tears at the memory.

Giao (pronounced Yow) Phan, now 46, is the Navy's assistant program manager on the George H.W. Bush project.

Among other things, she helps oversee budgets and works with the shipyard to determine technical specifications. She was tapped for the post in 2004 after a stint at the Pentagon. She visits Newport News at least monthly.

All his life, Tung Phan told his family he was rescued by an aircraft carrier. But a year ago, Giao Phan asked him which one. Was it the USS Enterprise? The USS Kitty Hawk?

Tung Phan's brother remembers it being the USS Blue Ridge, a Navy command ship with a helicopter pad. The former general started out in 1975 as a janitor for minimum wage at a Holiday Inn in Northern Virginia before moving on to better jobs.

"We got food stamps, medical assistance, clothes donated from the Red Cross," Giao Phan said. "It was difficult to live in that environment, because we were upper middle-class in Vietnam, with chauffeurs, cooks, two nannies taking care of the kids."

Of the nine Phan children, eight — including Giao Phan — are licensed engineers.

"This was truly just like they said," she said. "It was the land of opportunity and gave us so much."

Taking time to live: The yard vice president in charge of the George H.W. Bush preaches balance.

Scott Stabler recalls something he learned at a creative management course.

It was simple enough: Dwell on four things — spiritual life, family, work and physical fitness — for good balance.

"If you think about these things routinely and try to make them central to your life, this makes you more successful and happy," Stabler said. "It will make you less likely to crash and burn."

As Northrop Grumman Newport News’ vice president in charge of the George H.W. Bush carrier construction, the biggest job project now underway at the yard, Stabler advises his management team and workers not to let the job crowd out everything else.

"The shipyard can draw you in," said Stabler, 46, of Williamsburg. "There's a culture here of ‘Work hard.’ There's a culture of ‘Get it done.’ There's a culture of ‘Whatever it takes.’ And I try to counsel my folks to be sure you take the vacation, take the time off."

That's not just about doing right by the employees, he said; it's also about what's good for the company's bottom line.

"The rejuvenation … makes you a better employee," he said. "It's not about ‘Come have a field day and work in the (Bush) program,’ but it is a recognition that it's to the employee's and the company's benefit that people get some time off."

Stabler gets to work between 6:30 and 6:45 a.m., except on the two days a week he runs four miles. He hits no traffic on the ride in from Williamsburg.

"I have XM (satellite radio), so I’m flipping back and forth between sports and comedy and music," he said. "It's almost autopilot. You get in the car, and all of a sudden, you’re at the shipyard."

From his office in the seventh floor of building 1744, Stabler has a great view of the carrier.

Stabler's days are packed with meetings, e-mails and phone calls. He meets weekly with yard President Mike Petters. He holds meetings with his 12 direct reports, and meets with Navy officials about costs and schedules. He also holds rotating meetings with supervisors who oversee the trade workers — such as the machinists, pipe fitters and welders.

"What we’ll do is meet with each of the trades and figure out how well they are doing compared with those goals, in terms of production progress and man-hour returns," Stabler said. "And is there an opportunity to get ahead of the plan?"

Stabler, who graduated from North Carolina State in 1982 and has an MBA from William and Mary, has been at the yard since 1984. He and his wife, Beth, have two children.

About once a month, he said, he has to cut away from his family and work the weekends. That will happen far more, he said, over the next two years as the Bush gets closer to delivery. But when it does, he said, "Ideally, you try to give some warning."

Smooth operator: Capt. Tom Moore helped quell disagreements between the Navy and yard.

Navy Capt. Tom Moore knows exactly when to leave Fairfax County — 5 a.m. — to get to Newport News for an 8 a.m. meeting.

And if he has to stay overnight, he knows exactly where — the bachelor officer quarters at Fort Monroe. "It's a beautiful place," he said. Not too many people know about it, but Moore does. He's had a close relationship with the Newport News shipyard, on and off, for more than 15 years.

In 1991, as part of the crew of the USS Enterprise, Moore was the station officer who helped monitor the carrier's refueling at the yard. In the late 1990s, he worked at the Navy's Supervisor of Shipbuilding office here.

Now based in Washington, he's the Navy program manager on the George H.W. Bush.

He comes to Newport News once a month, meeting with yard officials about budgets, coming to terms on technical issues and walking the ship.

Brian Persons, the Navy carrier program office's civilian executive director, credits Moore with helping to shore up strained relations with the yard.

The Navy and yard had wrangled heavily over construction of the USS Ronald Reagan and the USS Nimitz refueling, Persons said, but Moore began smoothing things over when he arrived in 2003.

"Tom came in during an extremely difficult time in the program," he said. "We were really at odds with each other. We couldn't sort it all out. We’re not there anymore. We’re knocking things down ahead of time. A lot of that comes down to what Tom displayed … in handling adversity."

Moore said he and Scott Stabler, yard vice president in charge of the Bush, always have had "open and honest communication to really tackle the tough issues."

"In the past, the company was reluctant to tell you the bad news because they’re afraid they’re going to get beat up," Moore said. "But that framework just doesn't work. You hope things are going to get better… You might go two or three years with a potential problem, and then it gets too late in the delivery process" to fix things.

"This is not an adversarial relationship — we’re all in this together," he said.

Chapter 2 – In the Beginning

BUILDING THE GEORGE H.W. BUSH: CONCEPTUAL DESIGN

The Big Idea. Kent Paumier, an engineering designer, is shown with a computer-assisted design of a JP-5 pump room. Photo by Adrin Snider/Daily Press

As planning for the CVN-77 was getting started nearly a decade ago, shipyard engineers were developing a dream list: 3,800 ideas they were considering incorporating.

Some were to boost the ship's capabilities. Others were to improve safety, make sailors’ lives easier or reduce manpower requirements.

"They could be something that the fleet had requested or maybe that headquarters of the Navy might have had," said Susanne Leonard, the Bush project's deputy non-nuclear design manager. "They were things that we thought might be of value to the ship."

A shipyard advertisement in a magazine in 1998 even included a radical switch: two small islands, rather than one, and no mast.

But then a group of Navy and shipyard engineers met for months at the shipyard and whittled the 3,800 ideas down.

"To go into a contract with the technology that we (only) think we can do is not a good business practice for us," said Mike Smith, the Bush project's non-nuclear design manager.

They visited and talked with vendors and reviewed specifications.

Lots of factors go into the analysis, including cost, schedule and whether the technology can work in a huge city at sea.

"It's just like what you do every day on products you buy," said Terry Tyler, an engineering manager for the hull sections of in-service and overhaul carriers.

"Can you get it in time? Is it proven? Do you want to be the first guy with a DVD player in your van if you don't know if it's going to work?"

On the Bush, the shipyard and Navy first cut the list to 500 ideas, then to 360.

Then they took a recent USS Ronald Reagan design and laid the Bush changes on top of it. Some had a big effect.

The Bush's updated aviation fuel distribution system, with lots of linear feet of pipe throughout the ship, led to adjustments.

Of about 11,000 non-nuclear design drawings on the Bush, Leonard said, about 60 percent were "touched" — either changed dramatically or slightly altered.

LEONARD

The quest for new systems for the George H.W. Bush often led shipyard engineers far and wide — even to the basements of four homes on a rocky New England coastline. In one home, the children were wondering who all the official-looking visitors were. In another, an older man raved about how a system helped him clean up after his shedding golden retriever.

It was early on in project planning that yard engineers and the Navy were considering a new kind of waste-burning system on the ship. How better to decide whether a technology would work than to see it in action? So the engineers, Navy officers and representatives of a Massachusetts company that made it gathered at homes that had the system.

"Kids were walking down in their pajamas, coming down and saying, ‘Who are all these guys?’ " said Scott A. McInnis, an aircraft engineering manager who went on the trip. "We had Navy officers there in uniforms, the supplier of this stuff and little kids in their PJs running around."

Onward to the next home. "We went into one old guy's house," McInnis said. "He was the nicest guy. He had a golden retriever, and he showed us that ‘all that hair goes right down there into that microwave incinerator.’ "

A microwave incinerator, the system that the yard engineers were looking into, burns waste and renders it more environmentally friendly. The yard and Navy were considering including a larger version on the Bush.

They liked the incinerator, but in the end, the shipyard decided not to go with it, McInnis said. "We were close, but … it just wasn't where we wanted it to be," he said. "Here's a residential, small commercial business, and we have a ship of over 5,000 people, eating every day — with food scraps, daily waste all directed towards this thing.

"Its ability to do that in a shipboard environment was too much of a stretch at that point."

True or False?

Newport News Shipbuilding, now Northrop Grumman Newport News, built all 12 of the nation's active aircraft carriers.

False. Newport News has built 11 of the nation's 12 carriers. The New York Shipbuilding Corp. completed the USS Kitty Hawk in 1961. The Bush will replace the Kitty Hawk.

Meet Mr. VIVID. He looks as if you might find him battling dark forces in a video game, but instead, he's helping shipyard engineers design a warship in 3-D. About 6 feet tall, he can be programmed to kneel, sit and stretch his arms.

If he hits his head on something, perhaps that something is too low — and could be called a "foul" in designer speak. If he can't reach something, maybe it's too high. And if he can't make it through a tight space, a redesign might be in order.

"We use Mr. VIVID here to make sure everything is functional, that he's able to reach the valves in the overhead," explained Dave Hatchett, a senior designer at the shipyard. "We use VIVID to make sure we have a foul-free environment."

Decks, bulkheads, ventilation, piping, lighting — even furniture — are incorporated. The components are color-coded — lighting is yellow, for example, while structural pieces are blue.

Developed by the shipyard in the late 1970s, the VIVID program wasn't used to design the entire George H.W. Bush (most of the ship's design is the same as the original Nimitz).

But the program was used for select systems — such as parts of the island, the new aviation fuel pump rooms and sewage treatment system.

In the sewage treatment sections, for example, designers moved the pipes because of bad weight distribution. They used VIVID to find a way to do so without blocking a passageway. "We were able to look at a number of design tradeoffs pretty quickly with this tool," said Stan Bonk, a shipyard engineering supervisor.

With the system, workers who design systems inside a space — such as an electrical or ventilation system — can work independently, but what they do shows up on the larger program.

"It's all live, so when they’re doing their changes, I’ll see it happening here," said Robert Nichols, the engineering designer who used the program for the carrier's island. "We can work together, and it's all up to right now."

The designs then get translated into 2-D drawings for the workers on the waterfront.

Chapter 3 – Push to Get Ahead

It hails from mills in Pennsylvania and Indiana. It gets here mostly by flatbed truck in rectangular forms, ready to be cut, shaped and welded into a warship.

Steel accounts for more than 47,000 tons on a fully loaded, 102,000-ton Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, said Todd Curts, a senior sourcing representative at the yard.

Trucks drop off the steel, typically in pieces 10 feet wide and 30 feet long.

When it's time to turn a sheet into a part of the carrier, a magnet crane picks up the piece and takes it into the steel cutting shop.

About 25,000 full-size steel plates go into building a carrier, said Jim Cash, head of the yard steel fabrication shop.

The shop takes plates, which Cash said range from 3/16 of an inch to 6 inches thick, and cuts them into smaller pieces of various shapes and sizes.

More than 700,000 individual parts make up the main steel structure of the carrier, Cash said. That includes hundreds of thousands of pieces cut from the plates. It also includes hundreds of thousands of shapes such as angles, T-bars and I-beams. "That's a lot of part numbers," Cash quipped.

Since he began working at Northrop Grumman Newport News three years ago, senior sourcing representative Todd Curts has picked up a new language: the language of steel.

As one of five buyers in the shipyard's steel purchasing division, Curts bought much of the steel for the George H.W. Bush carrier. He is a liaison between yard engineers who create the ship specifications and steel mills.

"They refer to it in 100-weights, tons, metric tons, short tons, pounds," he said. "You really have to hang on when you’re talking to engineers and metallurgists because they will change units on you in a minute."

There's high-strength and commercial steel but also several grades in those categories and countless ways to process it. "You just pick up some of it," he said.

"You’re sitting in a meeting, and it just flies over your head for awhile, and eventually, you start realizing what they’re talking about. All the supplier catalogs have the definitions in the back. There are plenty of Web sites to go on that talk about the whole steel-making process."

For example, he said, "The more iron you put in it, the softer it is, so the more flexibility you’ll get out of it. But because it's more flexible, the less load it can take before it just bends on you.

"In some cases you want that to happen, and sometimes you don't."

When asked how many pounds are in a metric ton, he had an answer — down to three decimal places. "2,204.763, I believe it is," he said off the top of his head. He was a bit off. It's actually 2,204.622.

A California native, Curts was stationed twice at Langley Air Force Base during his 20-year military career, buying airplane parts. By the time his second tour ended in 2003, he and his wife had decided Hampton Roads was home.

"We put our roots down here," he said. "The kids had gotten older. They were high school age and had friends they didn't want to leave behind. I was tired of moving them around."

In his job, he said, it helps to be as conversant on steel as he can — so he can properly relay messages back and forth.

"There is so much involved," Curts said. "Not just the ingredients but the way they treat it, the way it's melted, the way the ingredients are combined, the way they cool it, press it, whether they wait till after it's cooled to shape it. It's really a mind-boggling process …You take all those combinations, and get all different qualities of steel."

Paying thousands of workers. Keeping track of equipment maintenance schedules. Ordering more than 60,000 kinds of parts. Building an aircraft carrier is, as much as anything else, a management challenge.

The George H.W. Bush is the first flattop to be built from start to finish using a new computer management system to account for all kinds of shipyard transactions.

Though it was tough to get used to and the transition wasn't always smooth, it drove better project management by better connecting activities at the yard, said John Shephard, senior vice president of operations at the yard until mid-2005.

Consider, for example, ordering parts for a key piping system.

"The system monitors the material that's been ordered," Shephard said. "You might need to start assembling that material today to have it ready in time for the ship next Thursday … The system is going to make sure you take certain steps so you don't forget."

The previous purchasing system was computerized but not as well integrated, he said.

"You might not find out there were parts missing until at some point the (production people) wouldn't be receiving them," he said. At that point, they’d call the logistics department, which would have to investigate. "Sometimes, they would say, ‘Oh, those aren't here yet.’ "

Parts of the old system used the COBOL programming language, which was getting increasingly expensive to maintain, Shephard said.

"It's a dead language, like Sanskrit or Latin. Nobody speaks it anymore. You were relying on this one guru who understood the language to fix anything — and he was getting ready to retire."

True or False?

The original name of Northrop Grumman Newport News was Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co.

False. The shipyard was first known as the Chesapeake Dry Dock & Construction Co. Its name was changed in 1891 to Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., which is still the legal name of the Northrop subsidiary.

After every piece of pipe LaTanya Clark installs in the George H.W. Bush, a shipyard inspector must come around and sign off on it.

Not that there's anything wrong with her performance, mind you. It's just that she works in one of the most sensitive areas on the aircraft carrier: the nuclear reactor rooms, the power source of the carrier.

"You have to make sure that whatever job you did is to the utmost highest standards before they’ll ever even pass it," Clark said.

"You have to make sure that everything is good to go. It's their job to find something wrong."

But she doesn't mind the extra scrutiny the nuclear workers are subjected to: "If my kids happen to join the Navy, it would be nice to know nothing is going to fall apart and blow up," she said.

Workers who handle pipe fitting, welding, electrical and other work in the nuclear areas are among the more skilled at the shipyard — with yard President Mike Petters once asserting it would be easier for the yard to replace him than a nuclear worker.

Clark, 29, a mother of three, is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area of California. After working in the Air Force as a computer administrator and police officer, she moved to Hampton Roads in 2001 to be near her mother.

Clark applied to work at the yard, where several of her mother's friends work.

"It's the first job I’ve had where I have to get dirty," she said.

Still, she says, she enjoys her work — particularly the gang of 11 other nuclear-qualified pipe fitters she works alongside.

"We have some funny people that we work with, so they make the day go by really fast," she said. "And if you have a question, nobody is afraid to help you. We all have to work together."

After coming to the yard and learning basic pipe fitting skills — which involves reading design drawings, squeezing into tight spaces and connecting pipes using various kinds of connections — Clark took an intense two-week class at the yard about the nuclear areas. The she had to pass a test to become certified. In the past year, she had two additional training sessions.

"It's a lot of information you have to retain on a day-to-day basis, but as soon as you go to work, you deal with it every day, eight hours a day."

• Like the rest of the Nimitz-class flattops, the George H.W. Bush will have what the Navy calls its "A4W" nuclear reactors.

• The "A" stands for aircraft carriers. The "4" stands for the fourth aircraft carrier reactor design — after an early prototype, the reactor for the USS Enterprise, and a design for the USS John F. Kennedy that was never used. The "W" stands for Westinghouse Electric Corp., an early reactor contractor in the 1960s.

• The Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin, Pa., and the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory near Schenectady, N.Y., designed the pressurized water reactor under Westinghouse's direction.

• One of the main providers of reactor equipment and cores for the George H.W. Bush is Lynchburg-based BWX Technologies, a subsidiary of McDermott International. Other reactor suppliers include Marine Mechanical Corp., in Cleveland and Curtiss-Wright Electro-Mechanical in Cheswick, Pa.

• The nuclear reactors on the Bush will go "live" — or become radioactive — closer to the ship's scheduled delivery date in 2008.

• Some of the steel and many big machinery pieces are ordered early — and so, too, are many components for the carrier's two nuclear reactors, which are low in the ship.

• A host of companies make instrumentation, control equipment, valves, pumps, fittings and auxiliary systems for the nuclear section of the ship.

Chapter 4 – Basic Pieces Take Shape

True or False?

The nation's first aircraft carrier was the USS Langley, named after Samuel Pierpont Langley, also the namesake of Langley Air Force Base and NASA Langley Research Center.

True. The coal ship Jupiter, built in 1912, was converted into the nation's first carrier in 1922 and renamed the USS Langley.

Given the choice between machining a new part in a shipyard manufacturing shop or installing that same piece in an aircraft carrier, machinist Steve Terry always chooses the former.

"You’re more involved with it," Terry explains of the shop work. "You take a rough piece of metal and run it through to completion, where you got a nice finished product. To me, that's more fulfilling and more enjoyable."

Terry, 47, a Covington native and the son of an auto mechanic and a nurse, started at Newport News Shipbuilding 25 years ago and has never left.

"If I like something, I stick with it and try to see it through," he said.

On the George H.W. Bush, one of Terry's biggest tasks was to machine the propulsion shafts, part of the system that delivers engine power to the propellers. Terry also machined shaft struts, rudders and bearings.

Terry used lathes and other tools to cut away extra metal, tapering the shaft to just the right specifications. He added a keyway — essentially a groove — to give added stability to the propeller in the way it's attached. And he used a horizontal mill for boring and other work.

The Bush has four shafts made up of several adjoining sections. Two of the shafts are 405 feet long.

Terry said he had to be ready to shift focus during the day. "The waterfront will call and say, ‘Hey, you got this part ready for us? Because we’re ready to install it right now.’ So your boss says to knock off what you’re doing and go and do this."

Terry became a machinist after being loaned out from the shipfitting department 25 years ago. When he asked whether he could stay on, they said yes — so long as he took second shift, 3:30 p.m. to midnight.

"After I got to work with it, I liked it," he said. "I had all morning to take care of the business I had to and then still come to work."

Terry occasionally worked day shift, but it was always tough getting used to. "I’ve been on day shift a couple times for different short training bursts on different machines," he said. "The wife didn't really like it, because she's used to her time … I guess it's habit, I don't know."

You would think a thick piece of quality steel in a pool of water would resist flame.

Think again: A machine at the yard's steel fabrication shop slices through thick plates sitting in a foot or two of H2O.

"The reason we burn under water is to not distort steel," explains Jim Cash, the head of the shipyard's steel fabrication shop. "It doesn't cause it to ripple, bend or bow, and cuts down on smoke and noise in the shop."

Featuring a rotating nozzle that can cut all sorts of angles into steel, the machine's plasma cutter has been around since 1980. The plasma shoots through a heat-resistant nozzle, which moves up and down the pool on a small gantry, quickly searing through several inches of steel at a quick pace.

Guy Shaulis, a shipyard machine hand, operates the cutter while sitting in a chair. He watches a sketch to make sure it's following the right line, making any needed adjustments. Before each shift, he makes sure the nozzles are working right so that he gets good cuts and smooth surfaces.

"If you have fuel injectors in your car, you wanted the spray from your injectors to come out the right way for it to burn," Shaulis said.

"If this nozzle gets messed up, you won't have a solid cut because you won't have a nice spray."

Work was going on all over the shipyard long before the George H.W. Bush rose on the docks.

There's a steel fabrication shop, machine shop, foundry, nuclear pipe shop, heavy-plate steel cutting facility, blast and coat shops, among others.

The facilities are studies in contrasts, said machine shop head Stewart Brenegar.

"We have features and technology the way we’ve done business not much different to what they were doing in the 1890s," he said.

"But intermingled with that, you have some of the most sophisticated equipment you can imagine."

His shop sports a battering ram that's been around since the 1940s, still used for ramming rudder pieces into place. It has the yard's oldest crane, bought used in 1915.

"It's an integral part of our business right now, today," Brenegar added.

And when it comes time to slide a metal sleeve over propulsion shafts, shop workers use an old method:

They heat the sleeve to expand it. Then they slide it over the shaft, with the sleeve bonding to the shaft as it cools. It all has to be done in three minutes or less or it's a bust.

"We’re consistently installing it in less than two minutes," Brenegar said.

But for all the old-time methods, the shops have lots of new equipment, too: computerized robots, high-tech welding equipment and machines that slice angles that humans couldn't.

Vincent Majette, a machine hand in the steel fabrication facility, says he can cut 50 to 60 parts a day using the robotic cutting machine, a big jump from the 15 a day he cut manually.

"I just watch it to make sure it's doing what it should be doing," Majette said. "I just compile everything and just hit a button, as opposed to being over a torch with heat busting out of it."

The increased automation means fewer workers are needed.

"It's easier on the employees," said steel fabrication shop manager Jim Cash.

"It also allows us to repeat the quality. The problem was when you have 30, 40 different levels of skill and different levels of ability to hold the torch still."

Brenegar The machine shop manager says some old methods are still used.

Cash The fabrication manager says automation shores up quality.

Some days he's a ship fitter. Other days he's a welder. Still others he drills and saws.

Meet Danny Clark, a "machine hand" in the shipyard's steel fabrication shop who helped build many pieces of the ship's island.

"I enjoy the idea of being able to learn a whole bunch of different things versus being stuck in one specific thing," Clark said. "It helps the day go by and breaks up the monotony."

Because he understands the entire process, he typically notices if something is amiss with, say, an engineering drawing.

"They might make a mistake on where they want the bevel, the angle on the end of the cut," he said.

"Because I fit up and weld up the pieces, I see that the bevel is not right (on the drawing) or it's not on there and it should be on there."

Sometimes, he said, he’ll catch mistakes before the actual cut takes place. He’ll tell his supervisor, who will ask the engineer if he or she meant to put the bevel on.

Clark, 32, a Baltimore native, has been at the yard four years. He first came when his father was stationed at Fort Eustis. After a stint in the Navy, he married a Newport News woman and never left.

One challenging aspect of working on the Bush, he says, was that the island was designed in 3-D rather than 2-D, which led to a new system of reference points on the drawings he follows.

"It's just like you’re used to driving a stick shift and you go to an automatic," Clark explains. "You’re looking for the clutch. It's the same way with the drawings… Once they changed it, you’re like, ‘Hold on.’ But once you understood it and got that down pat, it was just as easy as the other way."

Meet Danny Clark Machine hand

Chapter 5 – Crane's Eye View

Chapter 5 – Crane's Eye View

As the main operator of a landmark — the shipyard's giant gantry crane — David Rushing has a scenic view. From 23 stories above sea level, he's among the first around to see storms coming. He's spotted dolphins and a waterspout. And on a clear day, he can make out spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.

He also has one of the most important jobs.

Rushing controls one of the mightiest cranes in the Western Hemisphere — sitting in a cab beneath the gantry — for 80 percent of the 161 superlifts that make up the George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier's basic structure.

In a swivel chair overlooking a window and floor, with three joysticks and two touch-screen computer panels, Rushing converses by radio with riggers.

His task is to smoothly lift each of the massive structures off the ground using the crane's three hoist blocks, while delicately balancing them.

He moved the aircraft carrier's island, for example, a 708-ton section that will serve as an operational area on the flight deck. He's also lifted the upper bow, the lower bow and an 865-ton section of the flight deck that's the ship's largest lift.

One day in June, Rushing moved the island to a different spot in anticipation of its move onto the Bush. Lots of adjustments have to be made while the piece is elevated — an inch up here, a quarter-inch down there, shifts several times a minute.

Rushing, 48, of Isle of Wight County, has been a crane operator for 25 of his 30 years at the shipyard. He was one of the stars when former President George H.W. Bush came in for the island lift. During the ceremony, the former commander in chief radioed Rushing to move the island.

"Copy that, Mr. President," Rushing said.

Sometimes a large section of the ship must be suspended for several days. Someone has to be at the controls at all times, monitoring load levels on the hoists to make sure the piece is stable.

Rushing is typically the only one in the cab, 80 square feet of space where he spends most of his shift physically removed from the bustling yard below.

"Once I come up here, I’m up here all day long," he said. "It gets a little lonesome sometimes. I try to keep myself entertained." Sometimes he’ll read, and sometimes he’ll do regular crane maintenance.

The crane's levers and controls were updated in 2001. There's a small refrigerator and a microwave. The restroom is up a steep set of stairs.

Luckily, the cab has an air conditioner. Without it, temperatures would rise to more than 120 degrees in summer.

Rushing started out in the yard welding school 30 years ago, then worked as a shipfitter. But when another department was looking for forklift operators, Rushing volunteered, because it was cleaner work and he was "tired of blowing black stuff out of my nose."

That led to the crane gig. "It's got its pros and cons," he said. "It's unique, specialized and not too many people do it. So I get a sense of satisfaction out of that."

True or False?

The first vessel the shipyard ever built — hull No. 1 — was the tugboat Dorothy.

True. The vessel, delivered in 1891, now sits on display on Washington Avenue.

Chapter 6 – Putting it all together

The key to building an aircraft carrier: Cram pumps, valves, engines and wires into huge sections. Then add those pieces to others in the dry dock.

It used to be carriers were built in pieces, starting with the keel and working upward.

The shift to modular construction began in earnest in the 1970s. Under that theory, designed to spur efficiency, the larger the better.

"This is a jigsaw puzzle," said Harold Paxton, an aircraft carrier construction manager at the shipyard. "We said let's build that whole trunk as a module and slip it all down as one piece. As each ship got better and we learned, we make it larger."

Before the lifts are hoisted, as many components as possible are installed. That means those parts don't have to be snaked through narrow confines later.

"Once you put the unit on the ship, you’ve got to then go through all the passageways and the compartments to get the material on the boat," explained Ed Ludwig, a production control official. Doing as much of that outfitting first, he said, should save time and money. Pipes are often added to a superlift section even if they have to be connected later with other pipes, Paxton said. But wiring that needs to cross over from one section into another often won't be added until later.

The shipyard starts the whole process, Paxton said, by building what it calls "Base A" building units — steel structures ranging from a ton to 100 tons.

Those are then taken to an area adjacent to Dry Dock 12. That's where many of the units are assembled into 161 large "superlifts," which are sections with up to 25 Base A units and range from 100 tons to 865 tons.

The shipyard's goliath gantry crane, with a capacity of 900 metric tons, then lifts the sections and moves them to the dry dock.

Carrier Trivia 1: Building in big sections

Getting a superlift in place requires some maneuvering. Sometimes, for example, a pipe or other object must be cut off to allow the superlift in place. Other times, shipyard workers hook a clamp to latch onto the lift and jack it those last few inches.

True or False?

There have been two carriers called the USS Enterprise — both built by the shipyard.

True. The yard launched the first USS Enterprise (CV-6) in 1936 and the second (CVN-65) in 1960.

Dry Dock 12 is where every recent aircraft carrier — from the fourth Nimitz-class ship to the 10th — has been assembled.

But it wasn't built with carriers in mind. It's too shallow for the vessels, which get heavier after being loaded, to ever return.

Sporting one of the largest gantry cranes in the Western Hemisphere, Dry Dock 12 was built in the early 1970s and was geared to accommodate liquefied natural gas carriers and crude oil tankers.

The yard was seeking to do more commercial work. That was to offset an increasingly testy relationship with the Navy in the time of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the Navy's head of the nuclear reactors division.

"The relations were not good," explained David McKercher, the yard's facilities and waterfront support director. "Things got so bad there was talk about bringing the ships out into the river and letting (the Navy) come pick up the ships as they were."

The yard needed a place to accommodate the commercial work. Dry Dock 12 — 2,173 feet long, 250 feet wide, and 32.6 feet deep — was built to handle it. The dock, on concrete slabs 4 feet thick, was separated from the Navy part of the yard by a fence and gate.

View from up top. The carrier starts to take form in Dry Dock 12 in late 2005 at Northrop Grumman Newport News. PHOTO by NORTHROP GRUMMAN NEWPORT NEWS

The big dock was built to accommodate a new method becoming popular with the tankers but not then used in carriers: modular construction. That is, whole sections of the tankers were being built as a units and joined to the ship.

Soon, though, the market for the commercial ships proved unprofitable, and the yard needed something to do in Dry Dock 12. Enter the Nimitz class.

But, once a carrier leaves the dock and goes to an outfitting berth, it gains too much weight and draws too much water to clear the base of the dock.

"If you were going to build it over, the first big thing you would’ve done is make the dock deeper," McKercher said.

The conversion to modular carrier construction would likely have happened with or without Dry Dock 12, McKercher said. But the need to find a use for the dry dock likely put the yard on the fast track to that approach in the early 1980s.

LARGE FORMAT ILLUSTRATION

Chapter 7 – Evolving Design

Navy sailors should have an easier time monitoring and maintaining the jet fuel distribution system on the George H.W. Bush compared with previous carriers.

That's because the system — which pumps fuel from tanks in the hull to the flight deck so sailors can refuel the carrier's planes — can be tracked remotely.

Although previous Nimitz-class ships have had some remote monitoring and control capability for some valves — mostly using analog indicators — sailors on those ships often still have to manually open and close the valves.

"There are people on phones saying, ‘OK, open this valve up before I shut this valve,’ " said Navy Capt. Tom Moore, the program manager on the Bush. "It's very manpower-intensive."

Sailors on those carriers, Moore said, walk around with sounding tubes — essentially long tape measures they stick into tanks to measure the fluid levels of the jet propulsion fuel, also called JP-5.

"Inevitably, they get kinked and stuck, and the next thing you know, the guy would pull it up, and it broke," Moore said. "Then you couldn't sound the tank, and the next time, you have to clean it out and gas-free it."

But on the Bush, the workload should be easier. First, the monitoring systems are more computerized. Though the USS Ronald Reagan was the first to have computerized monitoring and controls, the Bush takes that to a new level.

"One guy can sit there … and he can open and close the valves from a remote station," Moore said.

The JP-5 distribution systems on carriers are huge, with about 125,000 linear feet of pipe. Main storage tanks, holding more than 2 million gallons of fuel, are in tanks inside the steel hull.

Three pumping stations at the bottom of the ship fuel 19 stations on the flight deck.

Combining tanks and other changes allowed the shipyard to eliminate 25,000 linear feet of pipe from the system.

But that, in turn, led to parts of the ship having to be redesigned: Lights and other equipment were shifted.

"If you doubled the size of the pipe, everything that shouldered up next to that pipe has to be adjusted," said J. Krueger Jackson, the yard's engineering manager for carrier electrical systems. "It just cascades all the way through."

In addition, overflow tanks were added. Sensors can detect spills. Nickel pipe was replaced with stainless steel to prevent copper from leaching into sensitive jet engines. Four watch stations were eliminated. More aviation fuel is at the ready at any one time.

And pinpointing the potential problems remotely is perhaps the best feature.

"It knows how it's performing, and it can report back to you that kind of information," said Scott A. McInnis, the yard's engineering manager for carrier fluid systems. "So you can maybe take some corrective action and you don't have the bigger problems."

While at sea, aircraft carriers — and most other ships — shed their sewage by pumping it overboard. But in port, where federal rules prohibit dumping, ships must hook into municipal sewage treatment lines. The Navy pays by the gallon to offload waste created by a city of 6,000.

The George H.W. Bush, however, won't need to hook into city sewage systems. It will process sewage onboard.

And what goes in — by way of sinks, toilets, urinals, washers and showers — comes out so clear and clean, it can be dumped overboard.

"It gets purified," explains Navy Capt. Tom Moore, program manager for the Bush project. "It has bugs in it to eat stuff, ultraviolet light to zap germs, and at the end of the day, the stuff can go directly overboard."

"They say you can drink what comes out of it," quips Mike Smith, shipyard design manager on the Bush. But he quickly adds, "I’m not going to test the theory."

Borrowing technology used for commercial cruise ships, the new system will save money and help the environment, the yard and Navy say.

Most wastewater — all except food scraps — will be processed, said Scott McInnis, an aircraft carrier engineering manager in fluid systems. The system cleans the fluid using biological processing and ultraviolet rays.

The Bush also will have vacuum flushing — like the kind on airplanes — which uses less water than the gravity-based systems on previous carriers.

It will be able to use fresh water made by the ship's desalination plants, rather than seawater. That helps prevent pipe corrosion and the need to blast deposits — and makes time in the stall more pleasant.

"The seawater has biological organisms in it, and when they decay, there is a smell associated with that," McInnis said.

"With a fresh water system, we’ve eliminated those odor issues."

True or False?

The first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was the USS John F. Kennedy.

False. The USS Kennedy burns oil for fuel. The first nuclear-powered carrier was the second USS Enterprise.

When you hook up your light fixtures at home, Mac Little explains, you have to make sure the right wires are going to the right places.

An engineering designer at the shipyard, Little does the same thing in his job every day — except that it's with the controls in the weapons elevator systems on the Bush.

"You go to Lowe's or Home Depot to get light switches and light fixtures for your house, and you have to be sure that the cables that run from box A to box B are connected right," he said. "That's what I do — make sure it's cabled properly."

The weapons elevator on the Bush will use touch-button programmable logic controls, an improvement over the 1950s technology used on previous Nimitz-class ships.

Among other things, the system's logic will make it easier for sailors to find and track problems in the elevator system, said Little, 59, of Newport News. He's been at the yard for 12 years (and nine more years in the 1960s and 1970s).

"With the old relay system they had to wirecheck with voltmeters to check the continuity, trouble-shoot every piece of wire to find the trouble spot," Little said. "With this you go in and look at the whole system on the screen, and it will show you, ‘Oh goodness, this switch didn't make contact.’ "

Little talks to people at Rockwell Automation, the contractor that makes the boxes, about once a week.

"We’re responsible for all the cabling between those boxes and being sure that the conductors in those boxes all go to the right points. … If the wiring is not done right, it may go to the wrong deck."

Little leads a team of three, and each layout is checked by at least two others, then sent to trades workers who use the layouts to install the cables.

"Just like when you get into the elevator at Hecht's, that when you punch the number two, … it goes to the second floor," he said. "You have to hook the cables right to do that. And that's my job."

Aside from the redesigned aviation fuel system and a new shipboard wastewater treatment center, there are many other changes. Among them:

• Propeller design: The four propellers on most of the Nimitz-class ships were designed with the older Forrestal-class carriers in mind. At 21 feet in diameter, the new propellers for the George H.W. Bush won't be any larger than the previous ones, but they will have a more curved shape to reduce wear and tear created by the spinning blades. It is hoped the new design will mean the props can be replaced every eight years rather than more frequently.

• Composite mast: Part of the island mast, made of glass and fiber, won't rust and will weigh 5 tons less than a comparable steel mast. This might be a hint of things to come, as the shipyard and Navy attempt to reduce weight on future ships.

• Weapons elevator controls: The systems that bring bombs to the flight deck from magazine stores will have better controls. If anything goes wrong, workers can pinpoint where the problem is — such as where a switch isn't making contact — simply by looking at a computer screen. In previous aircraft carriers, sailors often had to go around with voltmeters to find trouble spots.

• Hull paint: A new coating system should last 12 years instead of eight, which could help lead to less frequent dry-dockings. The new paint will limit organism growth below the waterline.

• Stores elevators: Sailors will have two new elevators to move large pallets of food, mail and other goods between decks. Sailors on previous Nimitz-class carriers use 12 conveyors, each able to carry up to 300 pounds, for such purposes. Five of those will be replaced with two larger storage elevators, which can carry 4,000 pounds each. The larger elevators are expected to be safer than the old conveyors, which have injured the arms and hands of many a sailor.

• Improved communications: Fiber optics in the island structure will reduce the need for cable.

Chapter 8 – Time Means money

Aircraft carrier fighting prowess is most often about its planes — such as how many bombing missions a day the carrier can launch.

Carriers depend on those planes, as well as other ships in the battle group, for protection.

But carriers do have their own guns, guided missiles and launchers as a last line of defense against incoming planes, missiles and boats.

The George H.W. Bush was supposed to have a new, integrated warfare system, with advanced radars and better weaponry.

But in what was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the Bush project, the new system fell through. An older and less capable warfare system — essentially the same as the one on previous Nimitz-class ships — will be on the Bush.

In the late 1990s, the Navy was planning to develop radar for destroyers, taking the flat-panel radars and Aegis missile-guidance system on existing destroyers to the next level. With more advanced searching, tracking and firing capabilities, that would improve those ships’ warfighting ability.

Why not, the Navy thought, incorporate the new radars on the new carrier — and tie it in with a new island and all-new launchers and missiles, too?

The Navy hired the shipyard, under a $615 million contract, to lead the development of the Bush's warfare system — a break from the past, in which the Navy bought those parts.

The shipyard tapped Lockheed Martin, the main Aegis missile guidance system contractor, for much of the warfare systems work on the Bush, with Lockheed sending 175 engineers to Newport News.

The idea seemed simple enough: take the new radar and warfare systems technology being developed for the destroyers, do further systems development and incorporate it into the carrier. But then the new destroyer program, called the DD-21, lost much of its money, later to be killed off. Much of the money for the destroyers’ new radars also went away, which affected the Bush.

In May 2002, only 16 months after signing the initial contract with Newport News to develop the system, the Navy canceled the contract for the carrier's new warfare system and went with the older one. That meant lost revenue for Newport News and Lockheed.

"It didn't make sense to make a unique radar for the carrier, and that was the direction we were going in," explained Navy Capt. Tom Moore, program manager for the Bush. "That's not our business." It spreads out the costs, he said, when more than one ship shares a technology.

Lockheed Martin offered some alternatives, including salvaging some of the new radar technology. The House Appropriations Committee report in 2002 criticized the Navy's decision and asserted that it should have tried to do more. "The Navy has decided to launch the last Nimitz-class carrier into the 21st century with vintage radars, basic self-defense capabilities, nonintegrated displays and generation-old computer processors," it said.

Congress gave $88 million for improvements to the new carrier, but the new radar and warfare system was never developed. The Navy stuck with its decision on the older system, arguing that it didn't make sense to go back and re-engineer a system solely for the Bush.

Scott Stabler, yard vice president in charge of the Bush project, said he was disappointed in the turn of events. "It was a great concept," he said. "When it moved out of the contract, we lost the opportunity … to do the kinds of things we love to do, which is to design, integrate and build complex systems." Moore defended the older system — with incremental improvements to both radars and weaponry over the years — as "state of the art." "Obviously, if you go talk to the warfare system guys in the Navy, their vision is that (the new warfare system) would eventually be a more capable system," Moore said. "But we haven't designed it yet. Are (electromagnetic catapults) better than existing catapults? It's advertised as better, but it's not ready to go on the ship. So you gotta go with what you got."

With production schedules in the balance, something had to be done — and quickly.

The George H.W. Bush was taking shape in Dry Dock 12, and the shipyard needed key parts for the ship's fluid systems at a rate of 25 a week.

But Tri-Tec Co., the Seattle-based supplier, was pumping out only four or five a week.

"We needed considerably more than that," said Barbara Neville, a sourcing manager in the yard's material-requirement planning division.

So began an intense — and ultimately successful — effort by the yard, over the course of several months in mid-2002, to help Tri-Tec get up to speed.

"Tri-Tec is an excellent engineering house, and their owner is a wonderful, wonderful engineer," Neville said. "But in terms of mass production, they had not a clue. … In fairness to Tri-Tec, they were a one-of-a-kind manufacturer and were not used to mass production."

The company made electronic actuators, which would allow sailors to open and close valves on the Bush from other parts of the ship via fiber-optic connections. The Navy wanted those actuators, which are used in all sorts of fluid systems, to take the workload off sailors.

Tri-Tec not only designed the actuators but landed the $5.2 million contract to develop, build and test 651 of them — in two sizes, with several variations — for the Bush. The parts, which included computer boards, were to be mated up with six other manufacturers’ valves before being installed.

The yard realized the extent of the actuator problem as it was putting piping sections into the lower levels of the Bush. In some cases, the yard adjusted the build sequence because of the issue, said John Shephard, the yard's senior vice president of operations until mid-2005.

"They kept saying, ‘We’re going to get more, we’re going to get more,’ and they kept being delayed and delayed," Shephard said. "We finally came to the conclusion that this is a serious problem, and we need to go out and help these guys fix this."

When the yard told Tri-Tec that its people were going out to Seattle to help, Neville said, the supplier wasn't overjoyed.

"Tri-Tec is a very proud owner, family-oriented company, and they took pride in the product they produced," said Neville, 54, of Hampton, who's been at the yard for 27 years. "But they also accepted that they had an obligation to meet the contract, and so they accepted the help that we offered."

More than 10 yard workers — including Neville and supply chain Vice President Veasy Wilson — visited Tri-Tec over several months. A purchaser and an engineer alternated spending a few days a week at the company's plant.

"If you walk into somebody's garage and it was the worst garage you’ve ever seen, that was Tri-Tec," Neville said. "Then … they had a garage sale, and they got everything on the shelves, everything labeled, everything in the right place — that was the afteraffect."

The yard also helped enact new processes. "You weren't making a piece over here and running over here to attach it. … You could go pull out a gauge, and you didn't have to hunt for it. It was a lot of common-sense things," she said.

Mark A. Haller, Tri-Tec's new president, was in a group that bought the company from the previous owner.

"There's no doubt about it, we were a mess," Haller said.

"We’re very, very bright in what we do, but we were a job shop. One to five to seven to 10 units at a time."

Haller also said the yard didn't initially realize how much it took to build and test the actuators.

The progress after the assistance was immense — going from five a week to up to 60 a week.

In the end, Neville said, the actuator problem didn't delay construction.

"We were grateful that they helped as much as they did," Haller said.

"We delivered 651 pretty decent units, and they’re all hand-built, all handmade."

True or False?

The first carrier Newport News Shipbuilding built was the USS Ranger.

True. Newport News Shipbuilding launched the 769-foot-long vessel, the nation's fourth carrier, in 1933.

Chapter 9 – Challenging Times

Chris Davis is like an increasing number of shipyard workers these days. He's young and inexperienced.

"I came here straight out of high school," said Davis, 19, an electrical worker who has been at the yard for about a year. One day last summer, Davis was working with cables in a weapons elevator machinery room on the George H.W. Bush.

"I have these tags that I’m supposed to put on," he said of the brown paper labels. "They have to go on after cables are run through tubes, but before the cables go into a box."

Nearby is Steve Lessord, who is teaching Davis the finer art of building ships.

"There's a bunch of new people in the crew, so I’m the boss's right-hand man," explains Lessord, 38, who has been at the yard for 20 years. "I’m one of the only mechanics who's really up to speed on all these weapons elevators. I’m trying to teach the guys, so I can wean them off of me — so they can take one over themselves later on down the line."

Scott Stabler, vice president in charge of the Bush program, said there are many "green workers" on the Bush.

"One of the big challenges from a management standpoint is that we’ve seen a lot of evolution in our work force," Stabler said. "We’ve got twice as many green folks on this program as we did on the Reagan."

Between 40 percent and 45 percent of the workers on the Bush have less than five years of experience. That compares with about 20 percent to 25 percent on the USS Ronald Reagan and about 15 percent on the USS Harry Truman.

The problem can be traced in part to the defense industry downsizing in the 1990s, when fewer workers were hired. The number of workers in their 30s and 40s — prime shipbuilding ages — is less than ideal.

To counter the trend, the shipyard is taking steps to ensure younger workers are trained, and older workers impart their knowledge to the younger workers.

Mentoring relationships such as the one between Davis and Lessord are a part of that.

Davis and his twin brother, both from Greensboro, N.C., came to Northrop Grumman Newport News after being recruited to play football at the Apprentice School, a combination of classes, yard work and, sometimes, sports.

But Davis ended up failing out of the Apprentice School in December. "College football is a little different, and it's a lot more hectic," he said.

"But you can keep your job if you’re doing a good job," he added. And he can reapply to the Apprentice School later.

Lessord, who played football at the Apprentice School 20 years ago, can relate.

Lessord's main goal, he said, is to teach the younger worker the little tricks that save time. "I try to teach them how to do things in the right order, so we don't have to keep going back to do things over," Lessord said. "That's one of the pitfalls of the new people."

Recently, Lessord said, one younger worker made a mistake, and cable tags had to be reordered.

But as for Davis, Lessord said, "He's doing pretty good."

More labor hours than initially projected, rising costs of supplies, increased retirement costs and inflation have hiked the price tag on the George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier by $868 million.

The flattop is now on pace to cost $6.19 billion, 16 percent more than the previous projection of $5.32 billion, according to Navy budget documents.

As recently as February 2004, Congress had deemed the carrier fully paid for.

The cost increase came despite the fact that the flattop doesn't have a key capability increase that was much touted early on in the construction project: an all-new defensive warfare system, with new radars and missile launchers.

Going with an older-generation warfare system — the same one the Navy uses on previous Nimitz carriers — shaved no money from the Bush's price tag.

The Navy said it and the shipyard underestimated the labor hours it would take to add changes to the ship, such as a new aviation fuel distribution system, from previous ships. It also said younger, less experienced workers took longer to accomplish tasks.

Capt. Tom Moore, the Navy's program manager, said an increased time gap between deliveries on recent carrier construction projects — to five years from three — didn't help.

"It's pretty clear that if you work on your house, and you work on it every three months, you get pretty proficient," Moore said. "But if you only work on it every four years, you have to go relearn it."

The Bush building project was supposed to take about 39 million man-hours, according to a report last year by the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress.

Scott Stabler, yard vice president in charge of the Bush project, declined to give an updated figure.

The Navy and yard initially pegged the number of labor hours for the Bush lower than the hours it took to build the previous Nimitz-class carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, Stabler said.

Now, he said, the Bush is higher than those targets, though still below the Reagan labor hours.

"We are constantly looking for a chance to do better," Stabler said. "We know what the return is going to be. The Navy knows what that's going to be. We are collectively working to make it as best as we can."

Aside from higher labor hours, a higher labor rate — driven by higher pension and health-care costs — shares some blame, the Navy said. So, too, does the materials budget.

That "was based on an incomplete list of materials needed to construct the ship, leading to especially sharp increases," the GAO said.

Much of the $868 million in cost increases that Congress is expected to pay on the Bush will go to increases in the base contract: That's grown to $3.69 billion, or $404 million more than initial projections.

And $347 million more of the new funding will go to cover "escalation" — payments to the shipyard for general inflation trends in the shipbuilding industry.

The Navy had budgeted $242 million for those payments, which are paid out under a formula created by the Defense Contracts Audit Agency, Moore said.

But inflation in the industry has since spiked, leading to projected payments in that category of $590 million.

True or False?

One reason aircraft carrier islands are customarily on the starboard side of the flight deck is to prevent crashes.

True. Pilots tend to turn to port rather than starboard (left rather than right) during emergency landings, so an island on the starboard side would be hit less frequently.

Carrier trivia 2: Definitions and a little history

• The United Steelworkers union has represented hourly workers at Northrop Grumman Newport News since 1979. Hourly pay rates range from $11.36 to $21.32, with many veteran workers making $19.46.

• Carrier catapults propel jets from zero to 160 mph in less than three seconds. An excellent aircrew can launch a plane every 30 seconds and land one every 45 seconds during daylight.

• The deadliest kamikaze attack on a U.S. aircraft carrier was on May 11, 1945, during World War II. Two Japanese kamikazes struck the USS Bunker Hill, killing 396 crew members and wounding 264.

• In 1969, as the USS Enterprise was operating near Hawaii, a rocket from an F-4 Phantom on the flight deck overheated and went off accidentally. The resulting fire set off nine larger aircraft bombs, killing 27 people, injuring 313 more, destroying 15 aircraft and a section of the flight deck.

• The USS Forrestal, launched in 1954, was the first U.S. carrier to be built from the keel up with an angled deck. That helps prevent landing planes from crashing into ones taking off.

• The front part of a ship is the bow; the back is the stern. To move toward the bow is to "go forward," while to move toward the stern is to "go aft." Objects are described as being "forward" or "aft" of other objects.

• Sailors stationed on aircraft carriers used to be able to talk to their families only via ham radio. Now every sailor has an e-mail account.

Sources: Daily Press research; "Newport News Shipbuilding: The First Century," by William Tazewell; "Aircraft Carriers," by Michael and Gladys Green; "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Aircraft Carriers," by C.A. Mobley and Michael Benson; Wikipedia, online encyclopedia

Chapter 10 – Outfitting the Bush

Yvonne Locke has painted thousands of metal studs on the George H.W. Bush's island.

Check that. She has painted thousands upon thousands — perhaps 10,000 or more — of the studs, which look like nails jutting from the island's walls. She's painted them from the flight deck level of the island to the top, six stories in all.

"It's just pretty much wiping the studs off, getting the rust off and painting them," Locke explained. "Where there's bare metal, you just put a little paint on it around the studs and make sure you have the whole stud painted."

Other workers then came along and hooked up insulation to some of the studs, which are welded into the walls. But the paint, she said, is vital. Without it, the studs "would get wet with moisture and rust out," leading to rust elsewhere.

"You can't have anything uncoated when you go out to sea," said construction superintendent Geoffrey Hummel. "That's Corrosion City out there. There's no room for bare metal on an aircraft carrier."

The rust Locke wipes off before she starts painting is simply surface rust. Locke, 27, who lives in the Denbigh section of Newport News, has been at the yard on and off since 1997. She had been laid off in a downsizing, then worked at Langley Air Force Base. She was hired about a year ago.

Locke says each day somehow manages to be a bit different. She's in a crammed space one day, in an open area the next, on a ladder other times. But sometimes the ladder is on flight deck level and she needs it upstairs.

"I get one of the guys to bring the ladder," she said. "If I ask them, they’ll give me a hand."

After the insulation is put up on the studs Locke painted, other metal covers it over, and that's painted, too.

"Once you’re finished," she said, "it looks like a hotel, a first-class hotel."

True or False?

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in an F/A-18 Hornet and announced that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

False. He landed in an S-3B Viking.

The five-bladed Rolls-Royce propellers for the George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier should survive the rough and tumble of the Seven Seas.

After all, they survived Hurricane Katrina.

When the storm hit in August 2005, all four propellers were in a factory in Pascagoula, Miss. About 12 of the foundry's workers — or about 20 percent of the workers — either lost their homes or had their homes significantly damaged, and the factory faced significant damage.

"But we were able to get up and running," said Rolls-Royce spokesman Erik Larson. "The employees got together and finished the propellers on time, despite the personal hardship."

The first propeller — as well as three others — were fine, and later were trucked to Newport News. The 60,000-pound propellers, 21 feet in diameter, are the largest ever machined by Rolls-Royce.

The propellers had been first poured at the Pascagoula factory in 2002 and 2003, but Rolls- Royce had to wait until the Navy settled on the final design before finishing the propellers off.

It could have been a standoff.

Leslie Bradshaw and a fellow sheet-metal worker were getting ready to install some ventilation in the George H.W. Bush's island structure one day this past summer.

But in the very same spot, in the corner of one of the island's upper levels, electricians were just about to add some cabling.

Such situations come up often in a ship construction project as big as the Bush — what with thousands of workers toiling in virtually every nook and cranny of the ship.

Who gets first dibs?

In this case, Bradshaw and his partner, who were working a later shift than the electricians and had a more flexible schedule, stood down.

"Rather than fuss about it, we just moved," Bradshaw explained. "Let's let them do what they have to do, and then when they’re gone, we’ll come back. You can sit there and argue and say, ‘Oh, I’m first, I’m here,’ and all that, but that doesn't solve anything."

Bradshaw, 48, a Gloucester resident who's been at the shipyard for 29 years, said there were times neither side would budge and workers had to go to management — "the guys in the white hats" — for resolution.

Most times, though, agreements can be worked out just by having a cooperative attitude.

"You gotta be nice about it," Bradshaw said. "You might need a favor — this light here could be in my way, so I go and ask him to move it, and he’d say no problem. Because I treated a man decently, there's no problem.

"But if I was contrary or hard to work with, then there is a problem, and he’d make me go through everybody else."

But Bradshaw is quick to point out that as nice a guy as he is, as a sheet-metal worker, he's the one with the torch.

"If we’re welding and they try to crowd us, they’ll move when the fire hits them," Bradshaw said.

"We just joke about that."

Younger shipyard workers, Thomas Benbow says, often rush into new tasks without so much as a pause.

But Benbow, 58, a shipfitter with 31 years of experience at the yard, has a different approach.

A skilled craftsman who has handled some of the toughest jobs fitting steel together on the George H.W. Bush carrier, Benbow makes it a point to spend quality time thinking through each job he's about to handle.

"An experienced fitter is going to look at his job before he does it," Benbow says. "I watch some of the younger guys, and they just go and start doing something. It doesn't work that way. Not fitting. You have to analyze the job."

Without shipfitters, it would be tough to build an aircraft carrier. They’re the ones who line up steel pieces of sub-assemblies, situating those pieces in exactly the right spots. They use rulers, which they carry on their belts, to ensure the piece is, say, 6 inches from a "work line" that has been chalked or otherwise marked on the pieces.

Teams of welders then come in behind them to fuse the steel parts together.

During fitting, Benbow sometimes will have to work around this bulkhead or trim that little piece of steel. He's not averse to asking other workers for their opinions, too — though it's often Benbow who can be seen advising the younger workers to stop and think.

Reviewing a task like that, he says, can help save time — and it can help to avoid redoing it later.

"Usually I have an opportunity to look at that job, to visualize that job, to go home and think about that job," he said. "I’m thinking of the best way to do it and the fastest way to do it."

On some of the more vexing jobs, he says, "I’ll have my head back, sitting there with my feet propped up."

But he’ll make sure the TV is off. "I can't do a lot of thinking with the TV on."

Chapter 11 – Ship Shapes Up

As the upper bow section on the George H.W. Bush was moving into place with the shipyard's giant gantry crane one March afternoon, Navy Capt. Tom Moore got out his Blackberry.

"Last Nimitz-class upper bow is in the air and moving in place," he hurriedly typed to his boss, Rear Adm. David Architzel. "Awesome."

Moore, Navy program manager for the effort to build the aircraft carrier, was on hand as a dozen or so yard workers carried out the task of lifting the 780-ton steel bow section — one of the last major sections of the last of a class of warships — into place.

The day wasn't without a hitch. Everyone was ready to go about 9 a.m. March 15. But a sharp wind off the James River — more than the acceptable 30 mph — hindered the move.

"The Weather Channel said it wasn't going to hit until about noon," said Bob Hickman, a construction superintendent, of the strong winds. "But it was already 23 mph when I walked out here" — and getting even more gusty.

Despite its immense weight, the upper bow section has such a big cross section that the wind can cause the piece to sway heavily, wreaking havoc. After one attempt, Hickman and others postponed the move until later in the day.

Everyone came back about 2:30 p.m., and this time there was little wind. Picking up the piece with three hoists, the crane effortlessly carried the assembly into the dry dock area in about half an hour.

Lots of parts — including major sections of anchor chains — were put into the front of the ship before the bow section was installed. The bow had pipes, lighting fixtures and other parts on it, as efforts to install as many pieces on the big lifts as possible became reality.

It sat there for about 10 days, with the crane still holding it up, as welders joined the upper bow section to the lower bow, which was installed a year before. Because one section flares out and one flares in, that's considered a tough job, Hickman said.

But Otis Freeman, a rigger who's been at the yard for 29 years — starting with the USS Carl Vinson, the third Nimitz-class ship — has seen this many times. Third Nimitz ship or last, little section or big section, he says, he treats all attachments equally.

"Even when it's only a 100-ton section, we handle it the same way," he said. "We go through the same pre-lift procedures. The adrenaline doesn't hit until it's over and the unit is in place, and we know we had a good, successful job."

As Moore watched the goings-on, he waxed poetic about what it all means.

"George H.W. Bush commissioned me as a naval officer in 1981, when he was vice president," Moore said. "To be the program manager of this ship, I feel honored."

True or False?

Work on the USS Harry S. Truman was interrupted by a 17-week strike by the United Steelworkers of America in 1999.

False. The Truman had been delivered by then. The USS Ronald Reagan was being built when the strike occurred.

One of the most recognizable pieces on the George H.W. Bush's island structure — its mast with antennas and radar — is made partly of new composite material.

The initial plan was to put a steel mast on the Bush's island, but when a new warfare system for the Bush fell through in 2002, Congress gave the Navy $88 million for new initiatives for the ship.

The Navy used some of that money to develop a new mast.

While the Newport News shipyard still built the old steel mast under its Navy contract, its sister company, Northrop Grumman Ship Systems in Gulfport, Miss., made a second mast of lighter material.

The shipyard installed the steel mast and cut off the top part. Then it replaced that part with the composite section Sept. 6.

"We said let's stay the course and build the steel mast, so if the composite mast doesn't come in time, it won't impact schedule," explained Scott Stabler, shipyard vice president in charge of the Bush.

Capt. Tom Moore, the Navy's program manager for the Bush, said the new mast shaved 5 tons off the carrier's weight.

"This is a design effort to see whether we’d want to expand composites into larger sections," Moore said. "Composites don't rust because they’re made out of glass and fiber — so less weight and, eventually over time, less maintenance."

The rest of the Bush's island incorporates key changes to the island that the USS Ronald Reagan had received.

Though the island's height is nearly identical to previous Nimitz-class carriers, there are only six decks instead of seven. That opens up overhead space on each deck to accommodate cables and wiring and allows for bigger windows.

The mast and radar systems might have looked different from the Reagan's if the Navy had gone forward with its initial plan to get an all-new warfare system on the Bush.

Though the island still wouldn't be able to accommodate the more advanced radars without modification, the $88 million from Congress was used to upgrade power to the island and add the composite mast. When the new mast was installed, the shipyard welded a coin from 1924 — George H.W. Bush's birth year — onto it.

Chapter 12 – A Floating Airport

There are times in shipbuilding when a job has to be done, but there's just no attractive way to go about it.

Take the case with the carrier's arresting gear.

Those are the cables that stretch across the flight deck — bringing planes to a screeching halt when they return from missions.

To put the machinery controlling that system into place on the George H.W. Bush, shipyard workers had to cut holes in the brand-new flight deck, lower the arresting-gear machinery into place, and then sew it all up again.

"This is the one place we bite the bullet," explained Dan Klemencic, a construction superintendent on the Bush. "We cut the old-time hole with some shipping machinery to get something in. It's a lot of welding, but it's in the plan. Everybody knows we got to do this."

Here's what necessitates it, Klemencic said: The arresting-gear mechanisms are too heavy to put inside the modular sections before they’re lifted into the dry dock. That is, the modular sections — heavy as they are — would surpass the capacity of the yard's 900-ton gantry crane.

Yet, if the flight deck piece were left off the modular section to allow the arresting gear to be lowered in place, the structure wouldn't be rigid enough to withstand the lift by the yard's big crane.

It takes five workers about eight weeks to do the job, about two weeks for each of four arresting gear engines. They use machines to cut the holes in the flight deck, then cut some steel beams below. Then they lower the machinery in place with the crane and weld it all back up again.

"The actual time probably gets spread out more than that," Klemencic said. "It just depends on what else the crane has lined up. It's not the hot job on the flight deck, so it kind of gets worked in between the superlifts."

GIANT SLINGSHOT. A rail for the jet catapult system gets cut.

Photo by Joe Fudge/Daily Press

Construction supervisor Ronnie Jones is usually a flight deck kind of guy.

For most of his 40-year career at the shipyard, he has focused on the installation of the catapults, the launching systems that propel planes from aircraft carriers.

But Jones moved to a different line of work on the Bush a few years ago because a gap in carrier construction meant there wasn't yet any catapult work to do. So he has helped out with the weapons elevators, the lifts that carry bombs to the flight deck from storage areas below.

And good thing, too. Jones came up with a new way of putting rails in place for those systems — using the same method the yard has used for years with the catapults.

When Jones first moved to the weapons elevators, he noticed that the rail in the elevator was much like the track under the flight deck in the catapults. Then he saw the method being used to put it in.

"It was horse-and-buggy stuff," Jones said. They were using a hanging wire to align the elevator rails between the decks, using hacksaws and "hand-tooling them into place," he said.

"I said this is just a catapult turned the other way," he said. "So we cut it all in a shop, machined it on a lathe, measured all this stuff where it ought to be and bolted it all together. Then we took a crane and lowered it all in place."

That job could be done with fewer, and less experienced, workers than the old method. And the alignment in the rails was better, too. Just like a good wheel alignment leads to less tire wear, so with the elevators.

"If you got a straighter rail and the cars are moving in a straight path, the bearings and everything else will last longer," Jones said. "Your wear path is more consistent."

The effort shows that looking at an old problem in a new way can lead to gains. "All it was taking stuff that I know worked up top and just applying it to another system," Jones said.

Sometimes you have to convince people that change is good, which Jones had to do in this case.

"It's sort of like a guy who says he's going to precut everything and put it in your house, and it's all going to fit," he said.

"At first you’re like, ‘I don't know about this.’ But after he does it the first time, and you didn't have to put up with all that sawdust in the kitchen, you say, ‘Hey, this is pretty good. I like this.’ "

This past summer, Jones moved back to his old job in time for the catapult installation.

"It's always good for a flight deck guy to get back … in the open air."

True or False?

Aircraft carriers have never been able to deploy atomic bombs.

False. The "nuclear" in the term "nuclear aircraft carrier" refers to the propulsion system. But the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, which deployed on a carrier in the 1950s, could carry atomic bombs.

When he has to, Ronnie Jones is not averse to using his fatherhood to his advantage.

A construction supervisor on the George H.W. Bush, Jones often depends on the shipyard's dimensional control division, which measures parts down to minute details and tolerances.

His son, Dale Jones, is a supervisor in that department.

"It does have its advantages being his daddy," Ronnie Jones says. "If all else fails, I will play that card — that you need to look out for me. We might have three or four jobs going, and he's really busy, and so I say, ‘Well, you know I wouldn't call and ask you on this if I didn't really need it.’ "

And more often than not, Dale finds a way to get his father what he needs.

Ronnie, 59, and Dale, 38, self-described "best friends" from Isle of Wight County, are far from the only father-son team at the yard.

But their interaction is more frequent than most. The Joneses deal with each other almost daily while working on the carrier. On weekends, while camping or fishing, conversation often turns to work.

"It's not unusual for us to be out there and he’ll mention, ‘Hey, I was just thinking that problem we got, we might be able to do this or that,’ " Ronnie says. "I don't hesitate to call him at home at night, whereas if it's one of my other foremen, I’d wait until the next day."

Ronnie, a 40-year yard veteran, supervises the installation of the aircraft launching and recovery systems. But on the Bush, he got started at an earlier phase, helping with the weapons elevator systems, too.

Dale, who's been at the yard for 18 years, joined the Apprentice School at 19. He's now a supervisor in the office that calculates readings of the dimensions of the catapult and recovery systems. Some equipment in the launching systems is so sensitive, tolerances need to be precise down to .003 of an inch.

Ronnie shows his son no favoritism, Dale insists. In fact, he says, it's quite the opposite. "I’ll tell you this, there's more expected out of me than any other foremen who works for him…That's guaranteed."

"He came to me this one afternoon, and said, ‘It's hard for me to tell you this, but I need for you to work this weekend.’ " Most people who work with the Joneses know they’re father and son.

"We do a lot of things together, and this is just something else that we connect on — just another common interest," Ronnie says.

Many of the big decisions on what to include in the George H.W. Bush were made upfront, before the project began.

But thousands of smaller decisions are gettng made as the aircraft carrier is built.

How much production capacity do the systems that make liquid oxygen for the planes need to have? What should the tiles in the galley and bathrooms be made of? How much electric power do the flight deck plane testing systems need?

"Twenty years from now, no one will ever think about these decisions," said Capt. Tom Moore, Navy program manager on the project. But they get made every day — with costs, capability and ease of installation all playing a role.

Take the systems that make oxygen for the carrier's planes.

The shipyard and Navy expected that the machines would make five gallons an hour. But this past summer, the company making the machines told the yard its systems could make only four gallons an hour.

The Navy had to decide: Was that good enough? "The question was, do we want to invest any more money to get that additional gallon?" Moore said.

"From a ship construction standpoint, these are big units. The (yard) came back and said, ‘Look, our vendor can get to five, but he's going to need to do some redesign work. We need to button the ship up to get it launched. There's additional expense to get it redesigned, and we’re not going to have them when we want them.’ "

Moore and his deputy, Giao Phan, considered that fewer planes need the oxygen-generating capacity these days.

Older planes — F-14 Tomcats, A-6s, S-3s — typically required that liquid oxygen be loaded into the planes to allow aviators to breathe at higher altitudes. But newer planes increasingly have their own oxygen-producing systems, so the need for carrier oxygen production has plummeted.

If the air wing's needs demanded it, Moore said, he would have pressed for five gallons an hour. But officials in charge of air wing specifications said four was fine.

"You got to make sure the ship is warfare capable, but you don't want to pay for any bells and whistles that you don't need," Moore said. "Why get XM satellite radio in the Lexus if we don't need it?"

Moore and Phan then called the Bush's new commanding officer, Navy Capt. Kevin O’Flaherty. "He's the one who has to go out and fight," Moore said. "I want to make sure he understands what we’re doing. We presented it to him, and he was comfortable with it."

Moore then called Scott Stabler, vice president in charge of the Bush carrier project at the yard, and signed off on the four-gallon-an-hour option: "We said, ‘Press on.’ "

TIMELINE

1996 – Newport News Shipbuilding begins developing new concepts for CVN-77.

Sept. 2, 1998 – The shipyard gets an "advanced procurement" contract worth up to $190 million to buy steel and early fabrication parts.

1999 and 2000 – Early work begins in the yard's steel shops.

March 19, 1999 – Shipyard gets a contract worth up to $246 million for planning and early design and engineering efforts.

October 1999 – The Navy orders many nuclear reactor components for the CVN-77.

Jan. 31, 2000 – Newport News Shipbuilding selects Lockheed Martin to help develop the warfare system.

Spring of 2000 – The Navy and yard meet to go over and agree on design and engineering specifications.

May 5, 2000 – The Navy awards the yard a detailed design contract.

July 27, 2000 – Congress passes the 2001 Department of Defense Appropriations Act, including $4.02 billion for the CVN-77.

Aug. 9, 2000 – President Bill Clinton signs that bill into law.

Jan. 26, 2001 – Thomas Schievelbein, then the shipyard's executive vice president, and the Navy sign a base construction contract for the yard to build the carrier — for a target price of $3.15 billion and a ceiling price of $3.69 billion.

November 2001 – Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman, the nation's third-largest defense contractor, buys Newport News Shipbuilding.

May 2002 – The Navy sinks plans to have the shipyard and Lockheed develop an all-new integrated warfare system for the Bush, saying it is too costly and not feasible.

Dec. 9, 2002 – CVN-77 is named for former President George H.W. Bush, a decorated aviator and the youngest Navy pilot in the Pacific during World War II.

March 2003 – An 800-ton double-bottom unit is laid in Dry Dock 12, the first section of the ship to go in the dock.

Sept. 6, 2003 – Keel-laying at Dry Dock 12. Keels are no longer used in ship construction, but Northrop Grumman Newport News holds a ceremony to mark the start of construction — including fighter jets flying over the event and sky divers parachuting in. George H.W. Bush chalks his initials on a piece of the ship, with the marks to be welded over by a yard welder. He declares that the ship's "keel" — actually a jet propulsion fuel pump room — is "true and fairly laid."

June 10, 2004 – Thousands of steelworkers approve a four-year labor contract with the yard by a 2-1 ratio, virtually assuring no project work stoppages.

July 2004 – The Navy and yard meet to discuss projected schedule delays and cost increases on the carrier. Congress later awards $867 million to cover the extra costs.

Nov. 1, 2004 – Thomas Schievelbein retires as yard president, replaced by Mike Petters.

Early 2005 – The Navy and yard agree in a contract modification to delay the ship's delivery date from March 2008 to November 2008.

March 8, 2005 – A 700-ton lower bow section is joined to the other keel sections in the dry dock, completing the length of the carrier.

March 15, 2006 – An 800-ton upper bow section is lifted into place, completing the ship's main structure.

June 15, 2006 – Shipyard workers Charles Pierce and Jimmy Shoulars paint the "77" designation onto the carrier's island structure.

July 7, 2006 – The ship's island is lifted into place. George H.W. Bush attends.

About Sept. 23, 2006 – Flood Dry Dock 12.

Oct. 7, 2006 – Christening.

About Oct. 8, 2006 – Carrier is slated to move to outfitting berth 1.

Mid-December 2007 – Bush is scheduled to be moved to Pier 2 for testing and more outfitting.

November 2008 – Expected delivery of the ship to the Navy.

Late 2008 into 2009 – Expected commissioning.

5,000+ Full contingent of personnel on a carrier (ship's company, air wing).

? – What's Next

After the commissioning on Saturday, October 7, 2006, the shipyard has two more years of work before delivery to the Navy. The main steel structure is complete and most piping is in place, but wires hang everywhere, scaffolding and machinery are all over the place and the bulkheads are tinted with surface rust.

There's plenty of work left to complete the living spaces — the galleys and the bedding areas. Office space is a long way from being ready to go.

The catapult system has to be tested, which will be done by shooting loads off the ship on the banks of the James River in 2008. Even the nuclear reactor is far from starting up. That will occur before the sea trials that year.

As shipyard workers continue to work on the ship, about 350 sailors are assigned to the George H.W. Bush, among the first in a ship's company that one day will number about 3,000.

The Navy is planning to add about 100 sailors a month between now and the ship's expected delivery to the Navy in November of 2008, said the ship's commanding officer, Navy Capt. Kevin O’Flaherty.

Many in the 350 already assigned to the ship are in senior enlisted ranks, such as chief petty officers who will assume leadership roles.

"We’re slightly more top-heavy at the senior enlisted level," he said. "Getting stuff started takes more senior personnel who understand how systems are put together … and who have been operators of systems on other ships."

About half the nuclear reactor department is in place, O’Flaherty said, and more than 35 officers are assigned to the ship.

"Most of the stuff that's going on right now is training," he said. "Half of the day is book work in the classroom, and part of the day is down on the ship looking at systems, the design and the layout."

The shipyard will turn 3,000 compartments on the ship over to the Navy under a schedule that starts in January and continues until November 2008.

The first crew move aboard for the ship, when sailors can live on board, doesn't happen until the summer of 2008, just a few months before delivery. But starting next year, sailors will begin to stand watch on the ship. "We’ll move the complete work day to the ship," O’Flaherty said.

"We’ll be doing muster and job assignments."

True or False?

Aircraft carriers are sometimes used to help in natural disasters.

True. The USS Harry S. Truman, for example, helped provide relief to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Navy Capt. Kevin O’Flaherty, a 1981 Naval Academy graduate and fighter pilot, is at the helm of the George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier.

O’Flaherty, a native of California, has commanded the USS Juneau, an amphibious dock landing ship, which he said was an invaluable experience.

"It gives you a different way of looking at things," he said. "You’re under the gun."

O’Flaherty finished training in the A-6E Intruder in November 1985, serving in two A-6E Intruder squadrons, including tours with the Eagles of VA-115 and a department head tour with the Milestones of VA-196. He shifted to the F/A-18 Hornet in 1996.

His sea tours include a tour as executive officer of the USS Abraham Lincoln and Commanding Officer of the USS Juneau, participating in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.

The Navy typically requires its carrier commanders to be naval aviators and well-trained in nuclear propulsion systems that power the ships.

He spent time learning about catapults and arresting gear at Lakehurst, N.J. and about combat systems in San Diego.

"I’m happy to be here playing my part," said O’Flaherty, who was moved to Norfolk in 2004.

"The crew is all pretty much fired up."

How did this book come together?

In January, the Daily Press began to discuss the best way to highlight the christening of the George H.W. Bush, the carrier's construction milestones, the end of the Nimitz class and the people inside who bring it to life.

By February, we asked for — and received — special permission to visit Northrop Grumman Newport News for exclusive behind-the-scenes visits. The shipyard agreed to let the Daily Press inside about once a month to document the final stages of construction, with the stipulation that nothing be published until the christening.

Since March, staff writer Peter Dujardin and staff photographers Adrin Snider and Joe Fudge have been gathering the information and images that have resulted in the creation of this section.

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