The Navy has taken preliminary acceptance of the future USS John F. Kennedy, moving its newest aircraft carrier out of the shipyard phase and into a final period of testing and crew training before delivery next year.
The Kennedy, CVN-79, is the second Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier and is now approximately 99 percent complete, according to the Navy.
Under preliminary acceptance, the carrier will move from HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding division to the waterfront at Naval Station Norfolk, Va. The arrangement allows the Navy and the ship’s crew to take Kennedy to sea for additional testing, evaluation and training while the shipbuilder finishes the remaining work.
Formal delivery to the Navy is scheduled for March 2027.
“Achieving preliminary acceptance marks a new phase for the ship and her crew, allowing them to get more water under the keel as they test and train underway,” Capt. Mark Johnson, the Navy’s program manager for Ford-class new construction, said in announcing the milestone.
The carrier completed acceptance sea trials in August, but some important work remained unfinished.
Seven of Kennedy’s 11 Advanced Weapons Elevators had been completed at the time of those trials. Newport News is now completing testing of the remaining four elevators.
The elevators move bombs, missiles and other weapons from the carrier’s magazines deep inside the ship to the flight deck. The new electromagnetic system was designed to move weapons faster and more efficiently than the hydraulic elevators aboard the Navy’s older Nimitz-class carriers.
But the technology became one of the most persistent problems in the Ford-class program.
The first ship of the class, USS Gerald R. Ford, also experienced lengthy problems getting its weapons elevators working reliably. On Kennedy, completion of the elevators and the Advanced Arresting Gear — the system that catches aircraft landing on the flight deck — became two of the major obstacles to delivering the ship.
The Navy says all of Kennedy’s major systems are now complete.
That makes preliminary acceptance an important dividing line.
The carrier isn’t finished, and it hasn’t formally joined the fleet. But it is reaching the point where sailors, rather than shipyard workers, increasingly become the center of the story.
And the Navy needs another carrier.
USS Abraham Lincoln is finally making its way back toward the United States after an extraordinarily long deployment. USS Theodore Roosevelt has deployed from San Diego toward the Middle East. Other carriers are moving through maintenance, training and deployment cycles that leave relatively little slack in an 11-carrier force.
The problem isn’t simply the number of carriers the Navy owns. A carrier undergoing major maintenance cannot suddenly be sent halfway around the world because a crisis erupts.
Neither can a carrier still sitting in a shipyard.
That is why the movement of John F. Kennedy to Norfolk matters.
After years of construction delays, equipment problems and schedule changes, the JFK is finally becoming something the Navy can take to sea, put sailors aboard and begin turning into an operational warship.
Formal delivery is still months away, and commissioning and operational deployment will come later.
But for a Navy that has been stretching its existing carrier force across the globe, getting another flight deck out of the shipyard is no small thing.