Not only are the Navy's new landings ships sidelined for a myriad of problems, every ship made by Northrop Grumman at its Avondale and Pascagoula shipyard for the past several years will have to be re-inspected and possibly undergo very costly repairs. Every pipe welder and quality control inspector at those yards was de-certified. Those who were unable to pass a new certification exam were fired.
NorGum's spokesweasel said: “Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding is committed to building quality ships for our customers..." I'd be more impressed if they just did it rather than talk about it. When a company bleats about how they are "committed to quality", it's a safe bet that their main product line consists of various iterations of pieces-of-shit. [1]
Meanwhile, over at LockMart, the new littoral combat ship that they built has such stability problems that the ship has to have the equivalent of a live preserver welded on before it can deploy. The radar system sucks and if the ship takes a punch, it is expected to sink.
Oy. Maybe we can get EB to make surface ships. They'd cost a lot more, though. This is embarrassing. Avondale made the last 20 Knox-class ships, which were decent warships. Pascagoula cranked out the Spruance, Tyco and Kidd class ships, as well as a number of different amphibs. There were individual problems, of course, but I'm not aware of any serious class-wide problems.
This latest crap, though, is pretty damn bad. Both LockMart and NorGum need to think about spending a little less on lobbying and a lot more on building their fucking products.
[1]Ford was renown for cranking out piece of shit cars at a time when their advertising proclaimed that quality was "job 1".
Welcome To The Service Industry, Part 5
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5 comments:
Not sure our corporate masters thought it through when they decided to eliminate the middle class.
We shipped most of our military design, engineering and manufacturing overseas, and we wonder why they're not invested in quality products. Hrm.
If LockMart and NorGum spend any less on lobbying, someone important might actually be displeased with the crap they are turning out. Keep the important people happy and the complaints from the rest of us will just be pissing into the wind.
Life preservers? External fuel tanks? Painted a nice jaunty orange, no doubt. With red bulls eyes painted on them, too, you betcha.
Y'know, this is a solution I'd have no problem with if we were talking about, say, a passenger liner. But, err, isn't this supposed to be a COMBAT ship? As in, like, people actually *shooting* at it? (And yes, I know kerosene doesn't explode when you shoot at it, but still, kerosene floating around on the water in a combat zone with incendiaries flying around is a bad idea for OH so many reasons). Or are these tanks supposed to be empty, life preservers indeed?
As Nangleator points out, this is an unexpected side effect that our corporate overlords apparently did not think about when they exported all of our heavy fabrication industry overseas. Used to be, the naval shipyards had no problem finding pipe welders and quality control inspectors. Fabrication yards all over the country were a prime source of such folks. But now all those good high-paying industrial jobs are in China or Malaysia or someplace like that, and NG / LM / EB have to hire greenies straight out of technical school to do their fabrication work. Just goes to show that when you destroy the middle class, you destroy the defense industry too, because the defense industry simply can't produce product for a reasonable cost if not embedded in a robust industrial economy with a thriving well-trained middle class of industrial workers.
- Badtux the Aquatic Penguin
Oh Yeah..... We Make Stuff Here...We Make Ammunition .... And Bombs.... And Missiles .... And Weapons With Scopes That Have Bib-ly Verses On Them! Not Anything Of VALUE Mind You ... 'Ceptin' Maybe...... Jack Daniels! heh
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