New Aircraft Carrier to Be Christened in March '01; Sea Trials by '03.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: USS Ronald Reagan - Brief Article

The Navy's USS Ronald Reagan is scheduled to be christened in Newport News, Va., on March 4. The 100,000-ton aircraft carrier, called CVN-76, will be part of the Nimitz class, but its design was changed significantly from its Nimitz-class predecessors.

About two-thirds of the Reagan is different from today's newest Nimitz-class carrier, the USS Harry Truman, said Mike Petters, vice president and general manager of aircraft carriers programs at Newport News Shipbuilding.

The March 4 christening date was selected to coincide with Ronald and Nancy Reagan's 49th wedding anniversary, Petters said in an interview during the Tailhook Association's naval aviation conference in Reno, Nev.

"If you drive by the dry dock today, you start to see the ship raking shape. It's the ninth and final ship of the Nimitz class," he said. Construction is 46 percent complete.

After the ship is christened, however, it will rake at least two years to get it ready for sea trials, before it can be commissioned by the Navy m early to mid 2003. The christening is only a launch day, Petters explained. "We don't hit them with a bottle and they slide down the ramp. Those days are gone."

The Reagan, which will replace the USS Constellation (CV 64), was changed largely to accommodate naval combat requirements that have emerged during the past decade, particularly the "lessons from Desert Storm," Petters said. The Navy, for example, wanted to simplify the process of getting ordnance to the flight deck.

"So we redesigned the island house to include a weapons elevator. We moved the weapons elevator inside the island house to get us more storage area and facilitate ordnance handling," he said. "In today's Nimitz-class ships, you see an island and, behind the island, you see a radar mast. On the Reagan, you will only see the island because we incorporated the radar mast into the island, to make it one structure." The island will be placed on the flight deck next month. "As we went through the changes, it turned out that about two-thirds of the ship drawings are new, compared to the Truman."

One of the more drastic redesigns in the ship is a bulbous bow unit, which will give the carrier a larger under-the-water line, Petters explained. "People who saw the structure thought we were building a submarine. It's that much bigger than the current carriers," he added. A submarine bow is 35 feet in diameter. The Reagan's bow is 30 feet in diameter. "It will change the way the ship...