From Navy Times

 

San Antonio laid up in Bahrain

By Andrew Scutro - Staff writer

Posted : Friday Nov 7, 2008 9:43:49 EST

 

NORFOLK, Va. — The troubled amphibious transport dock San Antonio — in the middle of its first deployment — has been forced to undergo two weeks of maintenance in Bahrain due to leaks in its lube oil piping system, Navy officials said.

 

“They had a scheduled port visit,” said Lt. Nate Christensen, spokesman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. “They’re in port for two weeks for a maintenance availability on some lube oil deficiencies. It’s related to the diesel generators.”

 

Pat Dolan, a spokeswoman at Naval Sea Systems Command, confirmed that the problem involved leaks in the system.

 

The yard period began earlier this week, although the exact day was unavailable.

 

In late August, on the eve of its maiden deployment, San Antonio was stuck at the pier for two days with a broken stern gate while the rest of the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group got underway. That was the latest in a string of performance problems with a ship that was delivered late and at $1.8 billion, $1 billion higher than planned. A July 2005 inspection report made clear the first ship of the LPD 17 class would have perpetual problems.

 

Inspectors found “poor construction and craftsmanship ... throughout the ship,” and officials singled out problems with wiring. “Poor initial cable-pulling practice led to what is now a snarled, over-packed, poorly assembled and virtually uncorrectable electrical/electronic cable plant,” the report said.

 

Its condition — along with another poor performance in 2007 — prompted Navy Secretary Donald Winter to publicly chide shipbuilder Northrop Grumman, saying the fleet “still does not have a mission-capable ship” two years after delivery.

 

Now in the Persian Gulf, San Antonio needs an extra-long pit stop for a problem that was foreshadowed in the July 2005 inspection report. “Lube oil temperature regulating valves in the main propulsion diesel engine (MPDE) lube oil systems were improperly set. Incorrectly regulated MPDE engine lube oil temperature prevented the ship from making full power for a sustained period.”

 

The April 2007 inspection report notes several subsequent lube oil problems.

 

While the ship is under repair in Bahrain, off-duty crew will be taking liberty ashore as well as conducting community relations projects, Christensen said.

From Marine Corps Times

 

Gator oil leaks: What went wrong?

By Andrew Scutro - Staff writer

Posted : Sunday Nov 16, 2008 16:31:30 EST

 

NORFOLK, Va. — Experts who have examined the photos of major oil leaks aboard the amphibious transport dock San Antonio are calling the workmanship on the new amphib “sloppy,” “unacceptable” and “criminal.” One former chief engineer said any other CHENG in the Navy would be “thankful this wasn’t their ship.”

 

But it is someone’s ship, and despite the finger-pointing, experts say the Navy has a serious problem on its hands.

 

The ship that was handed over to the Navy late, incomplete and $1 billion over budget now has more unwanted attention. A little over two months into its deployment, the ship entered the yard on Oct. 31 in Bahrain to fix the oil leaks — an embarrassing midcruise pit stop that’s expected to last longer than the initial two-week estimate.

 

Not long after the ship entered the yard, a series of photos showing lube oil leaking from failed welds in one of the ship’s main machinery spaces surfaced on the Internet.

 

On Nov. 12, Time magazine called the San Antonio “the Navy’s Floating Fiasco.” And its newest woes have the attention of the Navy’s highest authorities.

 

“The secretary has been briefed on the issue and has been getting periodic extended updates about the progress of the repairs,” said Capt. Beci Brenton, spokeswoman for Navy Secretary Donald Winter.

 

While the brass is watching and the shipbuilder defends its work and promises to make fixes, one question remains: How was this allowed to happen? And are other problems lurking?

‘I’m fuming’

 

Margaret Mitchell-Jones, spokeswoman for shipbuilder Northrop Grumman, defended the contractor’s performance and said the company is taking “corrective actions.”

 

“The quality of our work is something we take very seriously, and we have a rigorous program in place that includes inspecting and evaluating our work to ensure it adheres to the Navy’s requirements,” she said in a statement. “When issues arise, we aggressively address them in an immediate and methodical way. Upon hearing there may be a problem with lube oil leaks on LPD 17, we immediately responded with technical staff to assist in the Navy’s efforts and began our own in-house critique.”

 

She added that “we are proactively conducting a comprehensive review of our procedures, processes and policies surrounding the LPD-class ships currently under construction at our Gulf Coast shipyards. This effort includes the implementation of short-term corrective actions until, aligned with our customer, we fully determine the cause and need for any long-term corrective actions to ensure conformance and reinforce the commitment to quality we have in our work. We have invited and welcomed Navy participation throughout our own internal review process.”

 

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers also are taking notice. Josh Holly, a spokesman for the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee, said members “continue to follow [san Antonio’s] challenges. The seapower subcommittee is aware of the most recent issues, although the Navy has not briefed us yet.”

 

Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., a former vice admiral, said after viewing the photos: “It looks like more of a systemic problem from when it was built.”

 

“The ones who suffer are the bluejackets,” said Sestak, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and former top warfare requirements and programs officer for the Navy.

 

Naval analyst and author Norman Polmar put it more bluntly.

 

“It’s criminal. It’s criminal that the Navy accepted this ship,” he said. “And this is two and a half years after the Navy accepted the ship. It’s bad enough that it was delivered this way.”

 

Polmar said he thinks the San Antonio should be towed back to the shipyard.

 

“As a taxpayer and as a naval analyst,” he said, “I’m fuming.”

 

The first-in-class ship was delivered late and incomplete at $1.8 billion, $1 billion higher than planned. Two InSurvs — one in 2005 and a second in 2007 — made clear the ship would have long-term problems.

 

Following the lube oil leaks, inspectors from Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Surface Force and regional maintenance commands have gone aboard the follow-on ships in the class — the New Orleans, Mesa Verde, Green Bay and New York — to examine welds in the lube oil system. Navy Times has learned the engineers did not find systemic problems, but they did find faulty welds, according to sources familiar with the inspections.

Who’s to blame?

 

Those familiar with the situation do not blame the crew or Navy engineers for the problem, comparing it with the discovery of a flaw in your car’s chassis during a road trip: You may have topped off the oil and filled the gas tank before you left, they say, but you can’t be expected to examine work completed long ago, when the car was built at the auto plant.

 

Even those responsible for ensuring the material condition of the fleet — the ultracritical Board of Inspection and Survey — do so under certain assumptions, one Navy source said.

 

“Even InSurv wouldn’t have found faulty welds,” the Navy source said.

 

Cmdr. Jensin Sommer, a spokeswoman for 2nd Fleet, said her command “certifies units for deployment and for integrated training with carrier and expeditionary strike groups so they’re ready for integrated operations.”

 

“That’s a different type of readiness than material condition,” she added.

 

Pat Dolan, spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command, said naval engineers declined a request to explain the damage because they refused to comment on photos that had not been officially released.

 

The photos were posted on a blog and later authenticated by Dolan.

 

She did say that when the ship pulled into Bahrain, it was greeted by a crew of more than 30 engineers, pipefitters and welders flown to Bahrain from the U.S.

 

As of Nov. 13, there were no initial cost estimates and no available progress reports. “We’re still looking at mid- to late November for the repairs to be completed,” Dolan said.

 

She added that engineers are conducting a “root-cause analysis” and the repair and ship crews are fixing the flaws, noting “some that require replacing whole sections of pipe.”

 

Earlier, Dolan said the oil leaks had not posed a danger to sailors working near them.

Other problems lurking?

 

Naval experts and engineers familiar with the San Antonio’s history are concerned that if these welding problems went undiscovered until now, what other problems are waiting to pop up?

 

Jan van Tol, a retired captain who commanded the amphibious assault ship Essex, said he had deployments during his career commanding three ships that were interrupted by major breakdowns, and that it’s not unusual to have technical experts come aboard.

 

But the size of the repair team and the nature of this casualty is notable, he said.

 

“It surprises me to see oil leaking from such major points. I associate leaks with moving parts,” he said. “What’s unusual is the sheer number of people who are going out to address what appears to be a wider-ranging problem.”

 

Van Tol said he thinks any such flaw — if detected — would have prevented the ship’s deployment. So how did the ship get as far as it did?

 

“Are these systemic problems in one or more of the ship’s systems and physical plant? If they are, that goes to the question of craftsmanship and why did the Navy accept the ship? Are there ship-wide problems of a similar nature of poor craftsmanship and quality assurance? Who made the decisions to allow it to reach this point?” he said. “It raises the question of supervision and oversight, both at the shipyard and on the Navy’s side.”

 

He won’t go as far as other critics, but he did say the situation “certainly doesn’t look good.”

 

“It’s imperative to take a harsh, harsh look at how they got to this place. The Navy really needs to learn some harsh lessons,” he said.

 

Those lessons may soon be in the syllabus.

 

Sestak, the former three-star, has called for a hard look at the defense acquisition process since his arrival in Congress in 2007. He believes the problems aboard the San Antonio are a symptom of a larger institutional breakdown among the defense industry, the Pentagon and Congress.

 

As a former commander in the fleet, he said he finds it hard to believe that the San Antonio could have been allowed to deploy if anyone knew these breakdowns were imminent.

 

“I expected to be handed machines of war that had a certain level of readiness I then had to maintain. At times there were unexpected problems. Something could break. But I never expected to deploy with a machine of war, particularly a relatively new one, that had systemic problems that would take weeks at a time [to fix],” said Sestak, who commanded the George Washington Carrier Strike Group.

 

“When it’s something that appears systemic to the construction of the machine of war, we’re giving short shrift to our warriors out there.”

 

He said operators preparing for deployment care about how the ship and the crew perform; it’s not their job to inspect welds. Quality construction is supposed to be a given, something certified long before the ship is ever put into action.

 

In pre-deployment certifications, “they’re not looking inside the welds. They’re looking at how it’s operating at that moment,” he said.

 

Sestak said the LPD 17 class is just one weapon system among many with major problems.

 

“I’d like to go back to ‘What are the institutional processes that permitted this to happen?’ That is where I’d like to go back to the sources and find out how this can be done better,” he said. “I have proposed that we should have hearings on acquisition reform in the new session, with LPD 17 part of that.”

 

For Polmar, the naval analyst, the Navy’s experience with the San Antonio is a scandal worthy of investigation. He compares it to the infamous Air Force tanker deal that sent an Air Force civilian and an industry executive to jail.

 

Besides the money and shoddy product, Polmar said putting such a problematic ship to sea put sailors’ lives at risk.

 

“It’s as big in some respects as the tanker deal because it’s difficult to get to the truth of this,” he said. “It’s difficult to find out who accepted the ship. People went to jail and were fined in the tanker deal, and that’s the minimum of what should happen here.”

 

What’s particularly shocking, he said, are the repeated problems in such a new product.

 

“We’re talking about a warship,” he said. “You can see how the oil is leaking through those welds. You may see that on a ship that is 20 or 30 years old, not a ship that’s two or three years old.”

 

One naval historian, who asked not to be named because of his affiliations, was asked to think of another surface Navy program this problematic.

 

“The only thing I’d compare it to are [the littoral combat ship] and DDG 1000,” he said. “It just seems like the Navy can’t get it right anymore.”

From Navy Times

 

Winter remains unsatisfied with LPD 17

By Philip Ewing - Staff writer

Posted : Tuesday Nov 18, 2008 12:15:30 EST

 

Navy Secretary Donald Winter said Monday he “continues to be unsatisfied” with the performance of the amphibious transport dock San Antonio, which has been sidelined by emergency repairs since Oct. 31.

 

But after a speech in which he described the need for accountability and a “culture of quality” for Navy acquisitions and its private-sector vendors, Winter did not commit to new changes or penalties for problems with the San Antonio and its follow-on siblings.

 

“I continue to be unsatisfied with the performance there,” Winter said. “We are continuing to look at it. It’s a matter I’ll be spending some time on over the next few weeks. We’ll adopt an appropriate course of action ahead.”

 

Winter’s comments came after an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, in which he described his view of the role the private sector should play in working with the military. Although he didn’t mention the San Antonio class by name, he said the oversight of shipbuilding projects is “not quite as good as what I would like” and should include a focus on quality control from the earliest design, not just when ships are taking shape in the yard.

 

He singled out one of the world’s biggest shipyards, Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea, as an example of a yard that had impressed him with its end-to-end quality. It builds more than 70 ships per year for private-sector and government clients, including South Korea’s version of the Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyers.

 

On the other hand, American shipbuilding is in a state of “monopsony,” Winter said, in which a set of companies have only one buyer — the U.S. Navy — for their product. This makes it difficult for classical market forces to work, he said, and all the more critical that the Navy take extra care to manage its shipbuilding.

 

Winter did not single out defense giant Northrop Grumman, one of a handful of defense firms that builds U.S. warships, for the continuing problems with the San Antonio, although he has in the past. Last year, he exchanged letters with the company’s CEO, Ron Sugar, in which Winter complained about the condition of the San Antonio and Sugar responded by complaining about how many design changes the Navy had made, even after work on the ship had begun.

 

After a long, rocky road from its shipyard to the fleet, complete with delays, cost increases and many technical problems, the San Antonio made its first deployment in August. The Navy had been working to finish the incomplete ship since taking delivery in 2005, and in an Oct. 3 telephone news conference with reporters, its skipper, Cmdr. Kurt Kastner, said the gator had been performing well. But within a month, the San Antonio docked in Bahrain for emergency mid-deployment repairs to its lube oil system. Soon after, shipbuilding expert Tim Colton posted photographs online that showed the level of the ship’s degradation, including streams of leaking oil.

Link to Tim Colton's photographs of the San Antonio's condition:

 

Link (PDF document)

That is pretty sad workmanship. It must have been teach your child to learn welding day.

From DefenseNews

 

San Antonio Underway After Repairs in Bahrain

By andrew scutro

Published: 25 Nov 17:57 EST (22:57 GMT)

 

NORFOLK, Va. - Nearly a month after limping into Bahrain with extensive seepage from the lube oil system for its main propulsion diesel engines, the amphibious transport dock San Antonio got back underway Nov. 25.

 

"Repairs have corrected all deficiencies and the lube oil system has returned to fully operational status," said Pat Dolan, spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command. "The oil leaks were attributed to inadequate pipe supports, poor welding, material selection and insufficient [quality assurance]."

 

Dolan said a "root-cause analysis" is ongoing, and some technicians from the original team of more than 30 who met the ship in Bahrain on Oct. 31 remain aboard.

 

She said the repair job costs are about $1.4 million.

 

San Antonio's 25-day pit stop began about two months into its maiden deployment. The ship left Norfolk late August with the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group.

 

While lauded for its design, the first ship of the class has been the subject of criticism for arriving to the fleet late, incomplete and $1 billion over budget, at $1.8 billion. The ship's deployment was delayed two days due to a broken stern gate.

 

On Nov. 24, Navy Secretary Donald Winter visited the ship in Bahrain before it restarted its deployment, taking time to personally examine the repair work. He has taken a personal interest in the San Antonio's troubled debut in the fleet, and has publicly criticized Northrop Grumman for the ship's condition when it was delivered incomplete to the Navy.

 

In the aftermath of LPD 17's breakdown, inspectors from NavSea, Naval Surface Force and regional maintenance commands have gone aboard the follow-on ships in the class - New Orleans, Mesa Verde, Green Bay and New York - to inspect welds in the lube oil systems. Engineers did not find systemic problems, but they did find faulty welds, according to sources.

 

Dolan said those class-wide reviews are ongoing.

That is pretty sad workmanship. It must have been teach your child to learn welding day.

 

Yeah thats sad that this happened to the San Antonio. I just read about the San Antonio and this is the first news ive read concerning it.