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Amphib San Antonio to skip scheduled deployment

The amphibious transport ship San Antonio, sidelined all year for repairs to the engineering plant, will miss a scheduled deployment next year in order to complete the work, Fleet Forces Command said in a statement released late Thursday.

San Antonio’s sister ship, Mesa Verde, which returned in August from a seven-month, 35,000-mile deployment to the Persian Gulf, will take the San Antonio’s place and deploy next summer with the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group, USFF said.

Problems have plagued the San Antonio since the ship was delivered in August 2005 from Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding. Although similar issues have, to varying degrees, affected follow-on ships in the class, the San Antonio, first in its class, has consistently been a problem ship — a fact the Navy acknowledged when it accepted the vessel after a prolonged fitting-out period.

The Navy and Northrop have long grown exasperated in trying to manage and deal with the ship’s problems, which have included poor electrical wiring installations, bad welds, a dysfunctional engine control system and faulty hydraulics in the stern door.

A persistent problem cropped up on all the ships of the class with contaminants in the engine lube-oil system. Earlier this year, while the San Antonio was undergoing an overhaul at Earl Industries in Norfolk, Va., engineers investigating the root cause of vibrations in the drive train — the engines, reduction gears and propeller shafts that drive the ship — discovered that bolts in the foundations of the diesel engines and the main reduction gears were improperly installed. If not fixed, officials said, the vibrations could eventually wreck the propulsion system.

Over the ship’s career, Navy inspectors also have cited the crew for poor maintenance procedures, and criticized training programs for insufficient instructions on how to operate the ship’s systems.

Last fall, Adm. John Harvey, head of Fleet Forces Command, ordered a Judge Advocate General investigation, known as a JAGMAN, to be carried out to get to the root of the San Antonio’s problems. The investigation, completed in January, concluded that a host of issues contributed to problems on the ship, including inadequate workmanship, poor quality control during construction, shortcomings in the ship’s design, and problems with the crew’s management of engineering troubles.

The ship completed her only fleet deployment in March 2009. The overhaul at Norfolk begun early this year was expected to take about four or five months and cost $5 million.

But largely due to the engine foundation problems, the work is now expected to take about 11 months and the cost has risen to at least $39 million, according to the Naval Sea Systems Command. The final bill will be higher when all the work is factored in.

But Harvey and NAVSEA seem determined to fix as many problems as possible during the current work package.

“We went to ground zero with the ship,” Harvey said in September.

“We wanted to try and get over the hump of incremental discovery,” Rear Adm. Jim McManamon, NAVSEA’s vice commander of the surface warfare directorate, said Sept. 30 during a phone interview. “To do it right, we’re taking a very deliberate approach.”

The Navy is working “to ensure that USS San Antonio returns to the fleet as a fully operational and deployable platform, and that the Navy has given her crew the proper tools and training necessary to use San Antonio to its fullest capability,” USFF said in the statement.

“San Antonio will deploy when it is operationally sound and ready to go,” Harvey said in the statement.

Navy officials said they were not aware of any new problems that have caused the ship to miss next year’s deployment. Rather, they say, the delay is due to the year-long overhaul.

Even though the repair work is continuing, the ship moved Sept. 10 from the shipyard to Naval Station Norfolk, Va., where she remains. NAVSEA officials expect the work to be finished about mid-January, after which the ship will need to go through a lengthy period of recertifications and crew training to return her to operational effectiveness.

Mesa Verde is the third ship in the San Antonio class, and is considered by the Navy and Northrop to have been delivered in much better shape than the San Antonio and the second ship, New Orleans. Commissioned in late 2007, she carried out a cruise to South America before conducting a full deployment with the Nassau Amphibious Ready Group that began in January with disaster relief work in earthquake-stricken Haiti.

Five ships of the San Antonio class have been commissioned, and a total of 11 are expected to be built, all at Northrop’s Gulf Coast shipyards. The 25,000-ton ships represent an enormous advancement in capability over the 1960s-era Austin-class amphibious ships they are replacing.