Gator debuts with young crew, hybrid power - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Gator debuts with young crew, hybrid power

ABOARD THE AMPHIBIOUS ASSAULT SHIP MAKIN ISLAND — The main engines were running, the flight deck was lined by sailors in their gleaming white crackerjacks and a throng of shipbuilders in hard hats was assembled on the waterfront. Slowly, gingerly, the Navy’s newest big-deck gator began to pull away out into the river and music crackled over the 1MC public address system.

It was alt-rockers Phantom Planet, playing their theme song from the TV show “The O.C.”

“Californ-iaaa … Californ-iaaa ... here we coo-ooome!”

And with that, the crew of Makin Island on July 10 bade farewell to the Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard where they have worked for years to finish their ship and started their trip to its home port at Naval Base San Diego.

“It’s amazing to finally be bringing our ship home. We’re showing off today,” said Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Fuels) Airman Kerry Guy. “It feels great.”

Guy, still learning the ropes in his first Navy assignment, not only had never been underway on Makin Island, he had never been underway on any ship. He and hundreds of others of rookie crew members, reporting from Naval Training Center Great Lakes, Ill., have spent months or even years as members of a San Diego-based crew with a ship in Pascagoula that had never sailed. Although it had been to sea for two rounds of trials, the gator’s July 10 voyage marked the first time its crew and captain had been underway in charge of the ship.

Hurricane Katrina delayed Makin Island for a year. There were labor problems with workers in the yard. In 2008, Northrop Grumman announced it had to re-do almost all of the ship’s electrical wiring because inexperienced “green labor” messed it up. The ship’s delivery date kept advancing off into the horizon. The delays totaled nearly two years and helped put the gator hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.

The rest of the Navy could feel the ripple effects, as when commanders had to push back decommissioning the amphibious assault ship Tarawa because Makin Island wasn’t ready to go.

But all that was forgotten, for the moment, as tugs spun Makin Island in the Pascagoula River to point the ship’s bow out to sea.

“Man, everybody woke up this morning with their headphones on — we were dancing — they’re ready to go,” said Guy, who reached back to his football career at Florida International University for a metaphor: Getting Makin Island underway, he said, was like the time he played at Penn State in front of 100,000 fans.

It’s what’s inside

Makin Island is technically the eighth Wasp-class big-deck, but it has enough improvements and refinements to stand alone as a class of one. Instead of two massive steam boilers, as with LHD 1 through 7, the Makin Island sports an advanced propulsion system that engineers say gives the ship the same power as its half-siblings but with much greater efficiency.

A set of Colt-Pielstick diesel generators provide power for the ship and for two electric motors plugged into the main reduction gears. For getting underway and runs at high speed, Makin Island has two General Electric LM2500+ gas turbines, which deliver 10,000 more horsepower per engine than the surface fleet’s standard LM2500 turbines.

“We’re not as fast as a hot-rod destroyer, of course, but it’s pretty fast. It’ll reach what it’s supposed to,” said Gas Turbine Systems Technician (Mechanical) 1st Class (SW) William Toten. Makin Island hit almost 25 knots on full-power runs in the Gulf of Mexico.

But most of the time, the ship will cruise around 12 knots, which it can reach by running the ship’s service diesel generators to drive its electric motors.

Makin Island has two distinctive Y-shaped exhaust stacks leaning to the starboard off its superstructure, which set it apart from earlier Wasps.

The ship’s plant is highly automated and computer-controlled, which has been good and bad so far. Makin Island’s skipper, Capt. Robert Kopas, boasted that he could start an engine from his stateroom — not that he would. But engineers told Navy Times that mastering the computer controls had been tricky.

The power plant has other benefits besides saving the Navy money on fuel, sailors said. For example, Makin Island’s turbines, which start with the push of a button, mean it can get going much quicker than its steam siblings.

“They have to start work on Friday to get underway on Monday,” said GSM1 (SW) Fili Tavarez. “We started the engines at 7 this morning to get underway at 9 — and we could’ve started them even later, but we were trying to be safe.”

Makin Island’s engineering team also said the ship’s machinery spaces were much cooler than a steam plant, where temperatures usually linger above 100 degrees.

The gator lifestyle

For all its technical advancements in the machinery spaces, most of the rest of Makin Island would be familiar to sailors who knew their way around a Wasp-class amphib. There are the wide port and starboard passageways running most of the length of the ship — known as “Highway 90” and “I-10” after thoroughfares in the ship’s former Gulf Coast neighborhood.

The hangar bay, well deck and vehicle holds are in the same places. There are acres of four- and five-high coffin racks for Marines, and berthing spaces for sailors are mostly unchanged from earlier ships. This stands in opposition to San Antonio-class amphibs, which have wide passageways and roomy berths.

“It would’ve been nice if we had those sit-up racks, but it’s OK — at least it’s not the Army,” said Damage Controlman 1st Class (SW/AW) Edilberto Abad.

One improvement that impressed sailors was Makin Island’s air conditioning, which kept the ship’s living spaces at meat-freezer temperatures. Crew members who came from the Tarawa said their old ship’s non-climate-controlled berthing spaces could get hot enough to disrupt their sleep.

Makin Island has Tarawa’s Morale, Welfare and Recreation vans — still painted with “LHA 1” logos — and will carry Tarawa’s old ship’s bell on its quarterdeck. Also aboard for the July 10 sail-away were more than 30 personal cars, trucks and motorcycles, chained down in a vehicle stowage area that normally would carry Marine trucks or Humvees. The transport service was offered for sailors who were assigned directly to the gator in Pascagoula and hadn’t been able to get their cars to San Diego.

Many sailors took advantage of the ample space — freed up by having no squadrons or Marines — to transport other personal gear to the West Coast. Aviation Maintenance Administration Airman Brandon Betts set up his drum set in an unused squadron room off the hangar bay. The night before the ship pulled away from its shipyard pier in Pascagoula, he rocked out along with a Linkin Park album in his headphones.

Betts, Guy and hundreds of others are part of a very junior crew; 12 percent of Makin Island’s sailors had never been underway on any Navy ship, and 52 percent of them have less than a year of sea time, said the ship’s spokeswoman, Ensign Lauryn Dempsey.

“A new crew’s a plus and a challenge,” Kopas said. On one hand, it gives him, officers and chiefs fresh clay to mold: “You can teach people things for the first time. They don’t have an attitude of, ‘We’ve always done things that way.’ ”

But sailors need experience to get better at their jobs, he acknowledged. More than 220 Makin Island crew members spent some time at sea aboard Pacific Fleet ships, he said, working to get a preliminary understanding of their jobs as their own ship sat in the yard.

The months in Pascagoula took their toll on the crew. They endured long work weeks, punishing Gulf Coast humidity and a very slim set of leisure-time options.

“We’ve been at Wal-Mart so much they probably think we were working there,” Guy said. “That was the No. 1 hangout for USS Makin Island.”

The next time the crew has liberty, it’ll be in Rio de Janeiro.