USNI News:
WASHINGTON NAVY YARD – The Navy and two shipbuilders are moving forward with the Flight III upgrade to the Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers (DDG-51), which adds an air and missile defense radar to the ship class starting this fiscal year.
General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and Ingalls Shipbuilding are collaborating on detail design of the Flight III upgrade, which should be complete by the summer of 2017, and both have responded to the Navy’s draft request for proposals (RFP) for Fiscal Year 2016 ship construction, DDG-51 program manager Capt. Mark Vandroff told USNI News in a Nov. 12 interview.
The two yards have taken the Navy’s preliminary design for Flight III, which was broken into 17 individual statements of work, and are working together to develop a 3D model of the ship that includes all equipment and distributed systems.
“We always planned to complete that some time in the late summer of 2017 because a ship that’s appropriated in FY ’16 generally spends about a year [procuring materials],” Vandroff said.
“A typical FY ‘16 ship wouldn’t start until the later part of 2017, and we would want the detail design to be done about the same time.”
The air and missile defense radar, Raytheon’s AN/SPY-6, is in the engineering and manufacturing development phase but is on track to be ready in time for ship construction, Vandroff said. The radar development is run out of the Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems, which has passed information to the shipyards through Vandroff’s office to support the Flight III detail design.
Virtually all the changes in Flight III support the addition of the SPY-6 radar. Vandroff said the primary requirements for the flight upgrade were to add additional power, cooling and weight margins for the ship’s service life.
“I could put a SPY-6 onto a DDG Flight IIA today with the power plant it has today, and it would work fine,” he said.
“There would be enough power. But there would be no growth margin for a 40-year service life. And if we’re building a new ship, we want to have similar growth margins on the Flight III that we’ve had historically on DDG-51s.”
To achieve sufficient power margins, Vandroff said the program office chose to replace the three Rolls Royce 3-megawatt generators on the Flight IIA ships with Rolls Royce’s 4-megawatt generator used on the Zumwalt-class destroyers (DDG-1000), which take up the same footprint on the ship and therefore give more power without forcing any ship design changes…
