HEAVY METAL

Maritime journalist Fabey takes a close look at the building of a new kind of aircraft carrier.

Newport News Shipbuilding has been in business for a long time, constructing commercial and military ships at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. In times past, the work was piecemeal, highly specialized, and clumsily coordinated, “leading to delays, misinterpretations, and production miscues.” These days, writes Fabey, much of the work of shipbuilding has shifted to the digital realm, leading to fewer such problems. Still, as he notes, there are plenty of other hurdles and headaches attendant in building a warship, especially in light of the fact that China is now floating an aircraft carrier (bought, ironically, from Ukraine), that add urgency to the work. Newport News had been busily working on the first of its new-generation nuclear-powered carriers, the Gerald R. Ford; throughout Fabey’s account, it adds to the new class with CVN-79, in time formally named the John F. Kennedy. At seemingly every turn, the shipbuilders face difficulty. It’s hard work to begin with, but then there are change orders from the Pentagon, labor-management conflicts, political currents that push for a bigger Navy on the one hand and belt-tightening on the other, the pandemic, and technical failures, “common enough for a new ship class, but the testing of this one dragged on and on, because it took longer than they thought it would to find and fix all the issues.” Fabey’s storyline plods at times, especially in technical matters. Even so, the text is a definitively thorough portrait of how a ship comes into being. In the hands of a John McPhee, the tale would have more zip, but it’s clear that a fitting amount of hard work and thought went into it, as befits the complex nature of the subject.

A sometimes labored but deep-diving contribution to marine engineering and transportation history.