Technicians light off LCS 2’s engines - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Technicians light off LCS 2’s engines

Shipyard technicians in Mobile, Ala., have started up the main propulsion plant aboard the littoral combat ship Independence, a milestone toward the ship getting underway this summer for sea trials, shipbuilder General Dynamics announced Monday.

Engineers tested and ran all the components that make up Independence’s combined diesel and gas plant — known as CODAG — including its twin MTU M71 diesels, twin LM 2500 gas turbines, drive shafts and the water jets that propel the ship.

Independence’s diesel engines are the most powerful high-speed diesels in the world, according to an announcement from Austal USA, which built the ship. Its General Electric gas turbines are well-known to Navy engineers, with 750 of them in service powering cruisers, destroyers and frigates across the surface fleet.

“With the main propulsion system now ready, we’re well on the way toward getting this ship to sea,” said Jeff Geiger, president of Bath Iron Works, in the announcement.

“It’s a major accomplishment for the GD LCS team and Navy personnel who have worked tirelessly to get us to this point. We will continue to perform system activation, testing and integration efforts over the next several weeks, but with this milestone under our belts, everyone is looking forward to taking in the lines and putting Independence through its paces in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The Navy hopes to commission the ship this fall. The first littoral combat ship, Freedom, was commissioned in November and is undergoing shakedown and shipyard work in Hampton Roads, Va.

Independence, a novel all-aluminum trimaran design, is more than a year behind schedule and is costing the Navy several times more than officials hoped. After an initial estimate of $275 million in February 2007, Navy budget documents for fiscal 2010 put the latest price tag at $704 million.

Freedom, also a year late, was initially estimated to cost $271 million, but fiscal 2010 budget documents put the most latest cost at $637 million.