Newport News christens its first sub in a decade.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

When first lady Laura Bush smashed a champagne bottle against the black hull of the Texas (SSN 775) in July, it was the first time in a nearly decade at the Northrop Grumman Corporation's Newport s shipyard had christened a submarine.

The shipyard--which sprawls for 550 acres along the north bank of Virginia's historic James River--is best "known as the sole supplier of the 12 nuclear aircraft carriers in the U.S. fleet today. Currently, it is building the last of the Nimitz class of carriers, the George H.W. Bush. Advance design work is underway on the first of the next generation of flattops, known as CVN 21.

Newport News, however, has been building submarines for a century, said Becky Steward, the company's vice president for submersibles. "We've been in the submarine business since there have been submarines," she said.

In the past four decades alone, Newport News has built 53 attack submarines, Stewart said. But it is coming out of a long, dry spell.

The most recent submarine completed by Newport News was the USS Cheyenne (SSN 773), a Los Angeles-class nuclear vessel christened in 1995. She was commissioned in 1996. Shortly after that, many submarine workers were laid off because there was too little work for them.

In 1997, when the company teamed with General Dynamics Electric Boat, of Groton, Conn., to produce the Virginia class, Newport News had to rush to find new workers.

"We really had to go through a workforce ramp up," Stewart said. Newport News had to fill more than a dozen shipbuilding specialties, and do it quickly, she said. "The machinists and electricians were the hardest to find," Stewart said.

The recruiting effort eventually succeeded, she said. About 2,000 employees out of a total of 19,000 at Newport News now work on submarines.

Many of the new recruits entered through the shipyard's apprentice school. Dating back to 1919, the school uses a combination of shop training and classroom instruction to teach 17 skilled crafts.

Welding classes have been thoroughly revamped to include computer-based training, said Bob Leber, who recently was named director of education and workforce development at Newport News.

"We cannot teach a person to weld just using a computer," he said. "However, by selectively concerting instructor-led training to computer-based training, our instructors now have more time to work on-on-one with new employees in the welding booths, where they actually learn to weld."

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