Where is the next generation aircraft carrier? When one toilet valve can disable an entire section of bathrooms?
At the USS Gerald R. Ford, the solution has been a pounding of maintenance calls, workarounds and an increasing list of internal frustrations surrounding a system that was meant to be the best and efficient. A Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer system-VCHT- of the ship makes use of suction to transport waste through small pipes, which in turn took the cruise industry as an inspiration, to save water. Small design sensitivities are soon turned into life on a platform that supports approximately 4600 sailors.
A Navy document that was obtained via FOIA via an undated document describes how common the issue became: “Every day that the entire crew is present on the ship, a trouble call has been made for ship’s force personnel to repair or unclog a portion of the VCHT system, since June 2023,” it reads. Since 2023, the ship has made 42 calls outside seeking help but 32 of them have been made in 2025. In a single internal communication, a March 18, 2025 email to chiefs, engineering has reported a two hundred and fifty-nine breakdowns within under four days, and give warning of the workload behind the scenes: “My HT’s are currently working 19 hours a day right now trying to keep up with the demand,” the message said. There is nothing new in those messages, but permanence.
The engineering issue is at the crossroads of small deviations and sloppy human factors. The vacuum pipes of the Ford are small and the system derails on objects that would be inconspicuous in an onshore plant brown paper towels, some toilet paper, clothes, and even rope. Another common failure point is a commode control valve which can be knocked out and due to the 10 vacuumed areas within the ship, a single component can fail and make the flushing in a level of 10 zones nonfunctional. One of the latest emails by the chief engineer was posted in March and provided simple operational instructions: “FYI, if you need to use the head, go now. At 13:30, expect the system to come down for about two hours. We are looking for a vacuum leak in zone 6.”
The problem is even more costly with mineral chemistry. The accumulation of calcium has been a long-standing concern of the Navy which has observed that clogs in the lower decks can be further aggravated by the conditions of flow and deposits. The GAO review of 2020 identified piping of insufficient size, and a maintenance procedure of acid flush costing $400,000 per treatment. Records indicate the Ford has already been acid flushed at least 10 times since 2023, and this can only be done at port, at which the crews have to treat the Ford at sea instead of reconfiguring the system.
For shipboard engineers, the VCHT saga is also about system coupling. As the Navy acknowledged during earlier vacuum-toilet troubles on the USS George H.W. Bush, a disruption in one location can ripple broadly because “a vacuum outage affects every commode in one half of the ship,” as described in a 2013 account of shipwide outages. That same dynamic appears in Ford emails, where isolating a leak or a failed valve becomes a hunt across thousands of components.
The long view is inevitable in the paper trail of Ford. Some planning-yard e-mail reply to the carrier relayed the time lag between quick fixes and redesign schedules: “What we want to do is give you a temporary resolution to get your heads into a somewhat functional use until such time 10+ years down the road when PMS312 finally gets around to paying for a redesign.” Navy has reported that VCHT upgrades will occur in future maintenance availabilities, and that the same upgrades to CVN 77 have minimized problems.
It is not that sailors must never flush the wrong thing, the record already shows that they do. The thing is that even in a ship that is supposed to ease crew work a fragile, so-called hot “hotel service” system can silently creep in as the job an everyday reminder that the glamourous platforms still rely on the prosaic business of moving waste safely, reliably, and at scale.
