Bits and Pieces

From our History Project, some random topics of interest. Work in progress – check back as this gets updated during the project.

31 Knots

I never recall speed or full power being an issue.

We did have a technical issue during full power trial at NAVSSES (specifically during crashback), but that was a demo of utility of testing first on land (found an issue with lube oil pump piping resulting in emergency shutdown during crash back test). The fix was installed in the ship prior to first underway.

By the time of OT, we would do full power demos while shutting down three of five DMS busses. Depending on hull cleanliness, we would flirt with 31 knots.

There was a heat issue, particularly at full power. Covered in Ray Weber oral interview. One complication not mentioned by Ray was the new partial collective protection for the machine spaces and design efforts to reduce engine space thermal signature.

Once we were comfortable with performance of all the equipment, full power would be demonstrated with three of five DMS busses powered down.

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Allison False Claims Lawsuit

_{Allison Engine Co. v. United States ex rel. Sanders}

The early Allison generator set growing pains became the basis of a false claims lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court twice, ended up coming to negotiated settlement, never adjudicated on the merits of whether a false claim occurred (i.e., Allison built a product deficient to the contract requirements, then billed the government “falsely” for deficient product.)

Timeline
– late 80s to 1991 – relator claimed deficiencies occurred
– 1995 – Allison sold by GM to Rolls Royce
– 2001 – defense witness deposition
– 2005 – Trial begins in Federal Courthouse, Dayton Ohio – with exception of one defense witness, only relators position presented before appeal commenced – trial ends with summary finding after five weeks.
– 2008 – Finding by Supreme Court that False Claim statute did not apply in this instance
– 2009 – GM Bankruptcy results in US Government owning many of bad assets of “Old GM” – which included liability from owning Allison until 1995
– May 6, 2009, President Obama signed into law the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009
– 2013 – Supreme Court declines to intervene on second appeal – can Congress make events illegal retroactively?
– 2014 – negotiated settlement

Basis of the claim: Two workers brought a whistleblower case alleging that subcontractors performed faulty work, including using unqualified workers, installed leaky gearboxes and used defective temperature gauges.

The relators position was presented in Dayton Federal Court in early 2005. Upon relators resting their case, the defense realized that while lots of growing pains had been discussed, there was no evidence presented on the actual act of “false claim” – in layman terms, knowing that contract terms were not met, a request for contract payment – the false claim – was presented to the government. Defense requested summary judgement before starting their case^*, which was granted.

The engine was not GFE, but CFE, and there was no evidence of a potentially fraudulent invoice going from Allison subcontractors through Allison, then BIW, and ultimately being presented to the government. Somehow, in a false claims lawsuit, the relator completely ignored a fundamental requirement – that a claim was presented to the government, whether true or false.

^* Due to impending Navy retirement, one witness for the defense was presented near the end of the realtors case, discussing the exact same engine was now reliable enough that ships would routinely conduct single GTG operations in war zones. The COLE Cheng was on schedule to testify to performance of #3 GTG helping save the ship, but the case was halted before she testified.

This started the first trip to the Supreme Court – does a false claim exist if it is not presented to the government, but only a subcontractor?

In 2008, the Supreme Court issued a finding that the false claims law could not be interpreted in a liberal manner, but there had to be proof that the “false claim” was submitted to the government.

Congress subsequently changed the law, addressing the particular circumstances of this case (false claim to subcontractor without evidence that it was presented to government) and backdated the law to capture this particular instance – Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009

This started the second appeal to the Supreme Court – what is the validity of Congress “backdating” a law to make something illegal that was not illegal at time of occurrence. In 2013, the Supreme Court declined the case.

In early 2014, the decks were again clear to adjudicate material issues of the case. Witnesses were warned to refresh their memory of who said what to whom on a specific day in 1991.

But … GM was owner of Allison at the time of the potential “false claim.” Rolls Royce had acquired Allison in 1995, but appears a liability like this might stay with the seller.

In the 2008 financial crisis, the government had inherited problem parts and liabilities of GM in the bankruptcy, which included this liability, and the government had found itself on both sides of the case – the funds due to the government on the false claims would come from the government ownership of the GM liabilities. Whether the government felt the underlying case was facetious had no bearing – the government would have been paying both sides to continue the case. So the government negotiated a conclusion to the case early in 2014 as follows:

– Settlement has no expression bearing on the merits of the claims, no admission of liability, etc.
– Defendants pay to USG $714,000 of which $214,000 is then paid to Relators
– GTC pays Relators $300,000
– Defendants pay Relators Counsel $3,336,000
– Reminder that all defendent costs incurred are unallowable costs under the FAR, that any charges in this category previously charged will be repaid within 90 days, and companies should expect to get audited on the correct treatment unallowable costs.
– Otherwise, all parties bear own legal costs.
– The agreement can be made public.

Observations
– The unofficial program position seems to be that the generators had growing pains that had been resolved by the conclusion of the DDG51 (extended) OpEval.
– The relators worked themselves into the potentially interesting position of having to explain why a uniform witness was telling the truth when they made negative observations on the engines, but that same witness lying when they made positive observations:
     – Sailors exhortations in the heat of the moment of generator failures were quoted with DTGs in the relators case
     – Later deposition of the eventual attained reliability was dismissed as “lying.”
     – “Are you lying to me now or lying to me then.”
– The preponderance of items raised in the claim were unrelated to the initial growing pains aboard ship.
– In a lawsuit on the governments behalf a significant number of uniformed witnesses supported the defense position.
– As a witness in the original trial, you felt you had fallen into a Grisham novel. Defense teams headquartered in a classic hotel, in downtown Dayton, with multiple floors given over to the separate legal teams (Allison, GM, Rolls Royce).
– After the bankruptcy, the GM files were literally left in piles of boxes to dig through, a new defense team had to pick up the case and start learning from the beginning.
– The only product of the lawsuit was an unimaginable number of lawyer hours billed over 15 years.

_{Disclosure – the author of this section was explicitly, by name, identified as “lying” by a sworn witness on the stand in Dayton Federal Courthouse, as captured in the official case transcript.}

Index

Allison Gas Turbine Generator Issues

The generators were one of the most significant issues through TechEval and OpEval, and contributed to the electric plant failing OT, requiring corrective action and retest.

Sources / causes of the issues:
– Gas Turbine Generators on DD963, DD993, and CG47 Class were integrated by Stewart & Stevenson using Allison turbines. For the DDG51, Allison decided to be the integrator.
– The generators were CFE, specified by BIW, not the government. The BIW specifications appeared to focus on ease of installation, a single pallet to drop into space, hook up, and operate.
– The Tech Authority did not take a strong hand (or was ineffective) in overseeing the design, to ensure that it was suitable.
– NavSup discarded the spares demand history for the similar units on DD963, DD993, and CG47 class. Not exact, but it would have been a good place to start, pending a complete logistics analysis. As a result, the generators were starved for spare parts. Spares had to be scavenged from in production or spare turbines. There were no fuel nozzles and a one year delay until they became available.

The net result of these was to discard all institutional knowledge from the DD963, DD993, and CG47 class, and start from a zero baseline. Maybe there was an assumption that the new design baseline would include the institutional knowledge. As the Master Chief says about assumptions ….

Design issues:
– The design had a large number of flexible hoses with gasket connections. The large number of connections meant the probability of having all be tight and leak free approached zero.
– The module did not have a solid deck. Instead, there was open grating, with auxiliary equipment installed below the grating. A dropped bolt, spilled oil, etc, was impossible to clean up or retrieve. Operating requirements are that the module be leak and FOD free, requiring excessive manhours. In one DT event, it took 24 hours to locate and retrieve a single dropped fastener.

Planned Maintenance – despite the presence of an AG9130 at the hot plant and NAVSSES presence onboard the ship to write the planned maintenance with ships force, there was no known force that could cause the maintenance system to provide the correct maintenance procedures. Maintenance provided would rotate between 963, 993, or CG47 sets. Maintenance documentation only got corrected after an OT Readiness Conference in Puerto Rico when RADM Huchting took off a shoe and beat on the table like Khrushchev.

The NAVSSES team was fully invested in helping get the generators running, and a NAVSSES generator tech was often underway with the ship.

_{This led to another sea story that still may be sensitive to tell (involving the tail hook adjudication authority, a NavSea EEO advisor, and the first SpeCat message received by the ship). Check back in a few years….}

The DDG52 initial crew participated in a design refresh that was cut in later in production. An ECP package was developed for the existing production to mitigate the design issues.

While Allison took significant heat for the issues, all parties had contributed to the causes of the design concerns, and it took teamwork to resolve.

After resolving the initial technical issues, installing the ECP, waking up NavSup to fill the pipeline with spares, and getting the maintenance correct, the design proved robust. Single generator operations, during times of reduced combat systems load, to conserve fuel underway became routine.

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ArleighVator

For Trial A, the portside ladders from 01 level to bridge were removed and construction site style temporary elevators were installed to get the Admiral to the bridge. The ladders were unbolted and removed, construction staging style elevators installed and plugged in then removed right after Alpha Part 1. A very temporary, non-milspec install. More like what you would find on a building site. Don’t know if any picture remains.

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Alpha Trial Pt 3

A concern coming out of Alpha 1 was MRG wear patterns. Lots of early energy with experts hanging upside down over the gears, etc. With the trips to and from Portland, there were opportunities to call parts of the transit an extension of Alpha. At this point, I don’t remember whether Alpha Pt 3 was part of the transit, or a separate event.

US Industry had lost the formula for the specific hardened and ground gears needed for DDG51 – they had to carry more horsepower, be quieter, and weigh less. We had to bring back the technology from Germany – which learned from us after WWII. Somehow we worked with GE to get the design implemented – and as a result my memory is that they were GFE to the shipyards (at least until the design was proven).

There may have been some pinion and bearing fine tuning to adjust the wear patterns between trials. As GFE, prolly need to find the tech authority that led the adjustments, as BIW would have been in a support role only in making the adjustments.

A-3 would not have been contracted or specified, so maybe why there is not much paper trail. But if it had to be done, it just got done. And it would have been required by what was prolly a GFE issue, not a shipyard construction issue.

The MRG concerns eventually faded out, at least in my memory. Maybe we will get more from the Andy Summers or John Preisel interviews, or maybe as we walk the interviews into the NavSea design chain.

The contract would have said Builder Trial (i.e., HM&E), Combat Systems Trial, & Final Acceptance Trial. Later ships the first two were combined to save $.

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Data Multiplex System

Like many new items, experienced growing pains.

Subject of many GSE jokes early on:
– “Did you hear they are going to armor the new battle ship with DMS – nothing gets through DMS.”
– “What does DMS stand for – don’t mean shxx.”
etc.

Over holidays in 1989, team did lots of reverse engineering on DMS at NAVSSES. Started to understand how it had to be installed & operated. Don’t recall exactly what the crisis was then, but Rockwell (OEM) was in holiday shutdown, we had some gnarly questions, so we just rolled up our sleeves and worked to reverse engineer as much as possible. My part of the drill was crafting a computer program that would decode the message settings. I recall how excited the team is when we had decoded and reformatted a message control format, then had the system respond correctly.

After the first sea trial, the BIW operating engineer took a drill and made two holes in the front of the (GFE) propulsion console in central control to add “loss of communications” lights. Not sure that throttle control ever went to the bridge during builder trials.

The toughest task during TechEval was the two NAVSSES engineers that carried around the large DMS monitor box. It was just larger than the scuttle in watertight hatches, so they spent much of all General Quarters drills dogging and undogging hatches to get the test set to the next testing location. They may have been the only two folks that got more physically fit during the DT period. (Memory says one was Janet Buyer, but memory is not the best.)

With lots of work, got to where it was reliable.

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TechEval Missiles Fired

By one source, count was 48

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Throttle Control – early issues

See:
– Shaft Idle sea story
– Ray Weber interview
– Why Arleigh Burkes Handle Differently – Captain Kenyon Hiser, U.S. Navy – Proceedings – November 2004 – Preprint

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Vapor Compression Distillers

Initial issues covered in Ray’s interview.

My memory was that there were multiple VCD shipsets that were orphaned when the Spruance all-electric mods were cancelled after only one ship, so they were redirected to the DDG51 class. Their original design target was oil platforms (e.g. stable), turned out ship motion caused salt carry over. And they consumed mass quantities of citric acid to combat scaling. But the Navy did not have a robust non-steam watermaker at that time (was infancy of reverse osmosis technology).

Ray mentions they were quickly phased-out in favor of the RO units – only true in LantFlt. In PacFlt they persisted into the early 2000s, with increasing maintenance challenges.

This was the ONLY DT/OT issue that persisted until my time on PHM, and only because of PacFlt penny pinching – PacFlt funded a COTS RO unit that survived about one deployment. PHM’s 98-99 180 day deployment had 183 days of VCD Casrep. PacFlt finally funded the mil-spec ROs starting in 2000, but took several more years to get rid of the remaining VCDs and COTS ROs.

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