General Dynamics NASSCO guided by the tides of September 11th

By Donald H. Harrison

Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—This coming September 11, the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, General Dynamics NASSCO plans to christen and launch the USS Washington Chambers, named for the Navy officer who arranged a century ago for the first airplane flight from the deck of a Navy ship.

Having the ceremony on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks was based on the tides in San Diego Bay, and was not intended as a symbolic statement about America’s determination to defend itself against future attacks, the company’s spokesman Karl Johnson told members of the media touring the shipyard on May 13.

Karl Johnson

“Our launches for the T-AKE ships are really driven by the tides of San Diego Bay,” said Johnson. “San Diego does not move all that much between high tide and low tide, about one-to-two feet.  A T-AKE (the class of ship to which the Washington Chambers will belong)  is 689 feet long and about 26,000 tons when you put it in the water.  We have to have at least 6 ½ feet of tidal surge when we do that and that only occurs over about a two-day period every month.  So we know when the ship is going to be done, and what the tides are going to be thanks to our friends at NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.)  Where those  lines intersect—that is what drives our marketing analysis.   September 11 is the most ideal time for launching that.   March 19 is the most ideal for launching the William McClean (another ship in the same class) and so on.”

Tides permitting, “we also try to schedule our ceremonies when we can have as many people here as possible, and September 11 happens to be a Saturday morning,” Johnson added.  “We could have had it September 12, but the tides won’t be quite what we will have September 11.”

Nevertheless, he was asked, isn’t it a nice coincidence to have the ceremony on a day when everyone is thinking about the need for U.S. defense?

“Especially for a guy who put the Navy into flying,” Johnson responded. “We are going to have a very good ceremony.”

Will there be flyovers?

“We are hoping,” he said.

Washington Irving Chambers was a Navy captain when he was assigned to the Bureau of Navigation and put in charge of the development of aviation.  He is credited with having arranged for the flight on November 14, 1910 by Eugene Ely from an 83-foot temporary platform  installed on the deck of the USS Birmingham.

Ely’s plane, built by pioneer aviator Glenn Curtis, dropped from the platform to the water and kicked up spray before gaining altitude.  Ely flew it only to the beach at Norfolk, Virginia, but his feat was sufficient to inaugurate the age of carrier-based naval aviation.

T-AKE ships are “designed to carry everything a Navy task force would need from missiles to corn flakes, from ice to gasoline,” said Johnson.  “It’s a floating Walmart at sea.  It will pull into ports (at piers) like our Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal, load up with supplies and then go meet the aircraft carrier or any kind of ship out at sea and use high tension wire to replenish those ships at sea.  It also carries helicopters and you can use those as a method of cargo transfer.”

The Washington Chambers is the eleventh ship in the class, and nearby at General Dynamics NASSCO / The William McLean, named for a Navy physicist who developed Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, is being readied to become the twelfth, with a scheduled March 19 launch date, which incidentally coincides with the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat (the birthday of the trees).

While the two T-AKE ships were under construction at NASSCO, another ship, the USS Freedom, first in a class of Littoral Combat Ships with shallow drafts and maneuverability for fighting in coastal waters, was occupying the shipyard’s large floating drydock for some repairs.

Johnson said NASSCO’s floating drydock is the second largest on the west coast, the largest being one owned by BAE in San Francisco.  “San Diego is unique in that it is the largest Navy homeport that does not have its own  Naval shipyard.  There is only one other in Florida that has a high concentration of Navy ships in which there is no Navy shipyard.  So NASSCO, BAE, and Northrop—Grumman (which all have shipyards in San Diego), work together to provide those services for all the non-nuclear powered ships in San Diego.”

Besides such ships as the Freedom, “this floating drydock can handle all of the large amphibious assault ships they call helicopter carriers,” Johnson said. “The only thing we can’t accommodate are the aircraft carriers; they are just too wide.”

Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) are believed to be “the future of the United States Navy,” said Johnson.  USS Freedom “is the first one produced by Lockheed Martin; it arrived here a couple of weeks ago.  It (The class of LCS ships) will be the prime driver in the increase in ships in the San Diego port.”

Currently there are approximately 50 U.S. Navy ships home-ported in San Diego. Johnson said that there are projections that San Diego’s share will grow to 76 ships in an American Navy surface fleet of 313 ships.   Currently the Navy has 284 or 285 ships, he added.

Besides building and repairing ships for the Navy, NASSCO’s third major revenue source is the construction of commercial ships.  It has contracted to build three refined-oil carrying ships in a partnership with the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering of South Korea.  Daewoo is providing detailed designs, support services and some of the material for the ships, while NASSCO will also provide some materials, labor and an American flag for the three future vessels.

Under the Jones Act of 1920, only those ships built in the United States are eligible to carry cargo between U.S. ports.

Daewoo is one of the largest shipbuilding companies in the world, with 20,000 employees worldwide.

Although  the naval and commercial construction and the repair work sound like a lot of work, it is far from peak times at NASSCO.   Recently, the company announced that it may have to lay off as many as 900 in its 4,100-person workforce because of a slowing economy, and that another 247 jobs of subcontracting companies also may have to be cut.

“Right now we don’t know what the final number will be,” Johnson told the touring media.  “There are a lot of variables that go into it. … There are a number of things that could pop up in the next few weeks that could lead us to not go forward in our work force reduction.”  However, for the moment NASSCO has told its employees that “the work force reduction will start on July 12 and go through July 26.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World