Scratch another LCS
In what is fast becoming a regular news item, a Littoral Combat Ship–in this case the freshly commissioned Independence-class USS Montgomery (LCS-8) suffered engineering casualties during a transit in the Gulf of Mexico and is heading to Florida for repairs.
As reported by USNI News:
[Montgomery] was bound for the Panama Canal when Montgomery suffered two engineering failures. Now the ship is headed to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba under its own power but under propulsion restrictions before returning to Naval Station Mayport, Fla. for repairs, Naval Surface Forces confirmed to USNI News.
“The first casualty happened when the crew detected a seawater leak in the hydraulic cooling system. Later that day, Montgomery experienced a casualty to one of its gas turbine engines,” read a late Friday statement.
“The built-in redundancy of the ship’s propulsion plant allows these ships to operate with multiple engine configurations. However, with the two casualties resulting in the loss of both port shafts, it was determined that the best course of action would be to send the ship to Mayport to conduct both repairs.”
It’s the fifth engineering casualty suffered by an LCS within the last year. Montgomery was commissioned 10 September at Mobile at her builder’s yard and was on her maiden voyage to her home port, which will be put off for a time.
Seems that the quality of our naval vessels has suffered lately. I was on a Spruance Class ship, USS FLETCHER DD-992. In the time I was on it as the ship’s “Doc”, we only had one major engineering causality. And that was to hide the fact that we covertly went somewhere and to account for the fuel usage. Times must be hard for those Alabama shipyard workers. Hiring all those guys who need training on how to build a Naval vessel. (heheh)
LCS= POS. They took civvie designs and tried to kludge them up to milspec. Bad idea.
LCS was supposed to be both cheap to buy and available in quantity. It has not been either. Bath and Ingalls have put more DDGs in the water in the time it has taken the LCS shipyards to do what they’ve done.
Fucking pitiful.