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Refueling tops list of LCS crew challenges

By Philip Ewing - Staff writer
Posted : Monday May 18, 2009 13:26:57 EDT

ABOARD THE LITTORAL COMBAT SHIP FREEDOM — The Navy’s first littoral combat ship, Freedom, is so different from other surface ships that even mundane tasks require a whole new way of thinking.

Take, for example, refueling at sea. A regular warship matches speed with an oiler by syncing up the revolutions per minute of the ships’ propellers. The problem? Freedom doesn’t have propellers.

And that’s just the beginning.
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“This is a revolution, not an evolution, for the Navy,” said Cmdr. Mike Doran, captain of Freedom’s Gold Crew, which rotated onto the ship in March. “The normal way the Navy does things today doesn’t work for my ship.”

After about six months since it was commissioned in Milwaukee, Freedom’s two crews have had to reinvent just about everything involved with serving aboard a modern surface warship. Blue Crew sailors tackled some of them immediately as they sailed the ship through the Great Lakes, but other jobs had to wait until Freedom entered the saltwater domain for which it was built.

For its first refueling at sea in late April, no one was quite sure how the 3,000-ton LCS would ride when it pulled alongside a 40,000-ton fleet oiler. Even though it’s the fastest ship in the Navy, the flat-bottomed Freedom has a decided roll at slow speed.

To prepare, crew members trained in a simulator and later practiced with the oiler pierside.

Refueling underway will be critical for all the Navy’s littoral combat ships, which achieve their high sprint speed by gulping fuel like Kool-Aid. A deployed LCS could need to refuel as often as every three days, according to some estimates, making its ability to gas up at sea that much more important. Freedom will need to get supplies via helicopter in vertical replenishments, because it isn’t equipped to accept pallets of supplies zipped over from a Military Sealift Command ship in a traditional unrep.

When it was finally time for the refueling at sea, Doran stood on the port bridge wing with a laser rangefinder, measuring distance to Kanawha. With visual cues and constant minor adjustments, Freedom maintained a steady course alongside Kanawha.

“I won’t say that I wasn’t a little white-knuckled for part of the time, but it went very smoothly, it was great,” Doran said.

Another issue: Marine life. Doran said running at 40 knots or more means there is little reaction time if a whale near the surface crosses Freedom’s path, so he keeps lookouts on alert and won’t run the ship at high speed if poor visibility means they might hit a whale.

“If the weather is so bad we have lots of whitecaps, so it’s not as easy to see the blowholes, I’m probably not going to do it … because it’s just not worth it,” Doran said. “Will it hurt the ship? It may hurt the ship, but it’ll certainly hurt the whale.”

Luckily for the ship and crew, Freedom has not hit any animals during its high-speed runs on the ocean. But there are other things the ship also still hasn’t done.

Although it has been qualified to handle aircraft on its flight deck, Doran said Freedom still hasn’t launched and recovered the H-60 Seahawk helicopter it will use on its deployments. And the ship has struggled with side-door launches of the remotely operated vehicle that LCS will use to hunt for enemy submarines.

More than that, sailors still don’t know how fast Freedom can go. The ship’s Blue Crew, under the command of Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, holds the current top speed record of 47 knots, but Doran said he thinks Freedom can beat that.

“The engineering plant is still in a shakedown period,” he said. “And I think that, once we get it all finely tuned, the ship will go faster.”

http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2009/05/navy_lcs_051809w/