In-service airplane carrier program, a new main mast refitting, propeller refurbishment, aircraft launch and recovery equipment upgrades and 26 million man-hours of work was the RCOH of George Washington said Capt. Mark Johnson the manager of the PEO Aircraft Carriers In-Service Aircraft Carrier Program Office.
The line is effectively an overview of a project, but it is also how a nuclear aircraft carrier can practically disappear off the fleet of years without ever being loaded. In the case of USS George Washington (CVN 73), that fact extended to 2,117 days of port stay almost six years of a midlife refueling and modernization cycle that became the textbook example of schedule risk and what can be done to the crew when a ship ceases being a ship.
It revolves around the main line of the carrier, the Refueling and Complex Overhaul which is an evolution of once-per-service-life, where a Nimitz-class hull is out of service in the middle of its life to fuel its reactors and update or modernize key systems. The Navy plans it as a predictable, production-like event; a fixed order of teardown, inspection, repair, reassembling and testing and trials. Practically, the work is characterized by access what can not be seen until compartments are opened and by the fact that a carrier is not a platform, but an floating city of closely knit systems. It is constructed on regulated conditions: dry docks, rigorous radiology and testing regimes that record all the weld integrity to pressure limit. The reason why even the term overhaul category is termed by the Navy as Refueling and Complex Overhaul (RCOH) and scheduled as a multi-year industrial event instead of a maintenance one.
The yard period did not resemble a production line. The discharge of labor and other work disturbances during the COVID period coupled with supply-chain friction coincided with the job finding more work, with the locations becoming available. As of 2022, the Navy estimated the work to be 92.5 percent complete, but was continuing to keep tasks associated with propulsion plants, catapult work, and combat systems testing on the critical path. In the same update, two drivers that were not new were identified to work on complex refits; unexpected development of work during inspections and inefficient labor that builds up as the schedules slip.
The engineering implications were clear (carrier availability is a zero-sum game), but those human ones were more acute. With the ship lying at anchor, the crew virtually turned around on a platform which was incapable of providing the routine of deployment and at-sea proficiency training. When George Washington came back to service, 85 per cent of the designated sails had apparently never served in a vessel, a preparation hit that cannot be rectified by a one-time series of sea trials. Flight deck choreography, tempo of maintenance, reactor plant watchstanding, and the thousands of handoffs, small but necessary, needed to maintain the center of a strike group safe and operational all rely on muscle memories.
Mechanical issues were not the most challenging legacy. Through the extended yard time, the ship was linked to a series of suicides that revealed quality-of-life disintegrations of sailors who worked and lived surrounding a lengthy industrial overhaul. The episode compelled increased attention to onboard living conditions during the availabilities, access to mental health assistance, and stricter command attention to the time period between the deployment and the actual rest of the ship when it is neither deployed nor at rest.
The Navy carrier force only became as prepared as the industrial system capable of fueling, modernizing, and returning such ships on schedule, so the larger lesson here rests in the dry dock: the safety of the crew when they cannot meet the schedule, to which end policies must be in place to ensure that they are no longer abandoned to the elements, and that they are provided, in any case, with a structured exit, when the machine begins to run late or breaks down entirely.
