USS Gerald R. Ford: the US Navy's largest aircraft carrier

USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) is the lead ship of the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers¹, the newest class of nuclear-powered carriers in the United States Navy. She is named for Gerald R. Ford, the 38th US president, who served in the Navy during the Second World War. The ship was commissioned on 22 July 2017² and is home-ported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia.

Design and construction

Newport News Shipbuilding, part of Huntington Ingalls Industries, built the ship: construction began with a ceremonial steel cut on 11 August 2005; by delivery, more than 5,000 shipbuilders had worked on the hull. The Navy signed a $5.1 billion contract with Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding to design and construct the carrier. The ship was launched on 11 October 2013 and christened on 9 November 2013, with Susan Ford Bales, the president’s daughter, as sponsor³. She was delivered to the Navy on 31 May 2017¹ and commissioned two months later. GAO found construction was 56% complete against a planned 62% as of April 2013, citing material shortages and delays in critical technology; the ship’s procurement cost grew from $10.49 billion to $12.83 billion⁴ between fiscal years 2008 and 2014, a 22% increase GAO attributed largely to those technology delays.

The class introduces an electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) in place of the steam catapults of earlier carriers, paired with an advanced arresting gear for recovering aircraft. During initial trials the system fell well short of its reliability goal, recording just 181 launches between failures against a design target of 4,166. She also carries a dual-band radar combining X-band and S-band active electronically scanned arrays¹. A 2013 Government Accountability Office report found EMALS development costs had grown from $317.7 million to $742.6 million between fiscal years 2008 and 2014, while AAG costs grew from $75 million to $168.6 million over the same period, with both systems still immature at the time; the delays pushed back the ship’s planned launch and delivery by four months each⁴. A January 2025 Department of Defense operational test report, quoted in a Congressional Research Service account, found that EMALS reliability has not appreciably changed from prior years and still depends on off-ship technical support; during one 262-day deployment the Advanced Arresting Gear completed 8,725 arrested landings, while the ship’s advanced weapons elevators logged 11,369 elevator runs², also with the crew reliant on outside technical support to fix hardware and software failures.

Specifications

She displaces about 100,000 tonnes at full load and is 337 m long overall, with a flight deck 78 m wide and a waterline beam of 41 m⁵. Two Bechtel A1B pressurized-water nuclear reactors drive four shafts. Top speed is in excess of 30 knots. The Congressional Research Service reports the class can operate with several hundred fewer sailors than a Nimitz-class ship, reducing estimated 50-year life-cycle operating and support costs for each ship by about $4 billion compared with the Nimitz class; even so, the CRS finds a fully loaded Ford-class ship would face a shortfall of 159 berths for combat operations with all hands and embarked units aboard. The same report puts the ship’s final procurement cost at about $13.3 billion in then-year dollars, up from a procurement cost cap of $10.5 billion when the ship was first funded in fiscal year 2008². For self-defense she carries RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow and RIM-116 Rolling Airframe missile launchers, Phalanx close-in weapon systems and Mk 38 25 mm guns, with her air wing of 75 or more aircraft¹ carrying the ship’s offensive weapons.

Service history

Her first aircraft operations came on 28 July 2017, when an F/A-18F Super Hornet flew the carrier’s first catapult launch and arrested landing. Early service was marked by problems with the weapons elevators and with EMALS reliability, and the Navy identified an issue with the nuclear propulsion system in June 2016 that it verified fixed in May 2017. The Navy ran full-ship shock trials in June to August 2021, detonating about 40,000 pounds of explosives¹ near the hull to test its ability to withstand battle damage. The Congressional Research Service dates the carrier’s initial operational capability to December 2021, with her first deployment slipping to October 2022² after the elevator and other technical delays.

The carrier left Norfolk for her first full-length deployment on 2 May 2023, taking part in NATO exercises off Norway before operating in the Mediterranean. After Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, the strike group was diverted toward the eastern Mediterranean the next day, and the ship returned to Norfolk on 17 January 2024, after 239 days deployed and 10,396 aircraft sorties. During a later deployment, fire broke out in the ship’s laundry facilities on 12 March 2026; initial reports put the time to contain and clean up the fire at 30 hours, a figure a US official later disputed, and more than 600 crew members were displaced¹ after the fire-suppression system failed to activate automatically.

Fate

USS Gerald R. Ford remains in active service¹, home-ported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia.

Sister ships and similar ships

USS Gerald R. Ford is the lead ship of the Gerald R. Ford class; the Congressional Research Service reports the second ship, USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), is scheduled for delivery in March 2027, more than four years later than its original schedule. The CRS puts the estimated cost of the third ship, USS Enterprise (CVN-80), at $14.2 billion with delivery in July 2030, and the fourth, USS Doris Miller (CVN-81), at $15.2 billion with delivery in February 2032². The preceding US carrier design, the Nimitz class, remains the Navy’s other class of nuclear-powered supercarriers.