President Trump has expressed his displeasure with a new system for launching planes from the next generation of Navy aircraft carriers, and said in an interview that he’s ordered the Navy to scuttle the high-tech electromagnetic system in favor of an old-fashioned steam catapult.
“[You’re] going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good,” Trump recounted telling the Navy.
Trump says he was upset with reports of problems with the new Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, which is an integral part of the new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers. For decades, carriers have launched their aircraft using steam catapults, which takes up a large amount of space below decks and requires heavy maintenance. Since the Navy decided that the Ford class of carriers would use electromagnetic catapults, the service has wrestled with whether the technology would be mature in time to be used aboard the first ship in the class, the Gerald R. Ford, which will be commissioned this year.
Trump toured the ship and gave a speech in the ship’s hangar deck on March 2, and called for a 12-carrier Navy.
In the interview with Time conducted Monday night, Trump recounted a conversation he had with an unnamed official about problems with EMALS built by General Atomics.
“I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, ‘Ah, how is it working?’ ‘Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.’
Trump said that “sounded bad to me.”
“Digital. They have digital. What is digital?” he told Time.
“And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said — and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be — ‘Sir, we’re staying with digital.’ I said no you’re not. [You’re] going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”
Reached for comment, Huntington Ingalls said “The catapult system is provided to us by the government,” and referred follow-ups to the Navy.
General Atomics has not responded to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Navy said Thursday morning that officials were formulating a response, then said at the end of the day it would not be commenting.
“Obviously the president has an incomplete understanding of electromagnetic catapult system,” said Loren Thompson, COO of the Lexington Institute, a policy think tank that is partially funded by industry. “The legacy catapult is the last vestige of the steam-powered Navy. The electromagnetic system is the wave of the future. The idea that the Navy would not want to move on to the latest technology is not consistent with making America great again.”
The Time magazine interview was published early Thursday morning.
