Carrier flight decks will have 'pit stops' for Navy fighter jets.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Pit-Stop Smarts

A new aircraft carrier that is scheduled to enter service during the next decade will offer a radically different approach to servicing and prepping fighter jets.

The payoff will be a dramatic increase in the number of warplanes available for combat missions, Navy officials said.

Notably, the ship's flight deck will be designed so that aircraft can maneuver into a NASCAR-style pit stop, where they will be refueled, repaired and loaded with weapons.

This marks a significant departure from the way business is done on carriers today, where aircraft have to move around the deck and park at different locations for fuel, repairs and bomb replenishing.

The current process is time consuming and cumbersome, said Capt. Michael Schwartz, program manager for the Navy's future aircraft carrier, called CVN 21.

NASCAR-like pit stops offer an ideal combination of speed and efficiency, he noted. "In races, the car drives into one location instead of moving the car to different locations to get things done."

Aircraft carrier designers looked at the NASCAR model and decided it suited the needs of naval aviation. "Why not put in that kind of flexibility on the carrier, so we bring the maintenance to the airplane instead of having to pull the airplane around to different locations and constantly reconfigure the flight deck?" Schwartz said. In CVN 21, "we are going to have more parking places on the flight deck to give maintainers and fuelers more flexibility, so they can get more planes ready faster."

For the Navy, the ultimate goal is to be able to drastically increase the number of combat missions that can be launched in a single day. While Nimitz-class carriers today can manage up to 120 flight sorties in a 12-hour day, the goal is to raise that number to 160.

"Beyond that, there is a requirement to get to 270 sorties in a 24-hour flying day and sustain that over a four-day period," Schwartz said.

The pit-stop maintenance, along with changes in the location of the weapon elevators on the CVN 21, should help pump fuel and load ammunition at a much faster pace than is currently possible, he said.

CVN 21 designers concluded that getting the weapons on the airplanes is the biggest bottleneck with which they had to contend. Weapons are stored in magazines located in the lower decks of the carrier. They get lifted aboard elevators to the second deck, where the eating facilities typically are.

"We clear all the tables, assemble the bombs, then put them on carts and...