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He added that most of the items on the ship that broke were not items required to be shock hardened \u2014 though Downey and Lanzilotta didn\u2019t provide a list of those items. Typically, hull and combat systems are shock hardened, while items related to office and living spaces aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Downey noted that only about 5 percent of the work completed during the upcoming maintenance period will be related to fixing items that broke during shock trials; the rest will be modernizing the ship to get it ready for high-end operations during its maiden deployment, anticipated in late 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During shock trials, a small boat tows a 40,000-pound explosive behind it in the water. The Navy has marine mammal search teams ensuring that, though the times and locations of shock trials are planned around known migration patterns, no protected animals are in the vicinity. Once the go has been given, the blast detonates \u2014 farther from the ship during the first event, and then successively closer each time \u2014 and the crew of about 3,000 braces for impact. After the blast, the crew conducts damage control, looking for any signs of floods or fires and checking combat and ship systems to ensure anything that went offline is quickly restored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lanzilotta said helicopters were landing on the carrier within minutes of the blast, showing that the ship was still in fighting condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From here, he said, the crew will spend the next few days carefully examining systems and subsystems to ensure it has caught all the damage and then will put the ship through its paces to ensure nothing else pops up when the carrier zooms back towards Virginia at 40 knots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSometimes we can take damage and not notice it immediately because it\u2019s kind of something that\u2019s latent,\u201d Lanzilotta said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSo we\u2019ll be doing the full high-speed runs here within a couple of days, but in the meantime we\u2019re going inch by inch, stem to stern on the ship to make sure that we\u2019ve inspected her properly and don\u2019t aggravate anything that the giant bomb, that charge that was off the side of the ship, did yesterday,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once the ship wraps up these final assessments, it will go to the Newport News Shipbuilding yard in Virginia, just up the road from the carrier\u2019s homeport at Naval Station Norfolk, for several months of work. Once the ship is out, planned for the spring, the carrier\u2019s crew will begin basic training and prepare to come together with the carrier strike group and carrier air wing to train for the ship\u2019s maiden deployment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Downey said the ship has thousands of sensors onboard to help the crew monitor system health, and thousands more were added for the shock trials to measure how the ship moved when exposed to the detonation. That data will all be compared to the computer model that told the Navy how the ship was supposed to handle the blast \u2014 and the ability to validate or update the model will help PEO Carriers going forward as it builds out the rest of the class and looks at potential updates to make the hull and the systems onboard even more survivable in combat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ll go through that data over the coming months, system by system, mission area by mission area, and look to see if there\u2019s any near- to mid-term adjustments. Right now, at the initial point, we don\u2019t see any larger class adjustments,\u201d Downey said, adding that even some of the higher-risk systems such as the dual-band radar held up well to the shock trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/6772239.jpg.jpg\")