Navy leader promises to fix Ford aircraft carrier

The acting Navy secretary is reportedly under a lot of pressure from President Donald Trump to get the USS Gerald R. Ford to work, something his predecessor failed to do.

The aircraft carrier is over budget, behind schedule, and still experiencing problems with certain key technologies, namely the advanced weapons elevators built to quickly deliver munitions to the flight deck.

"The Ford is something the president is very concerned about," Thomas Modly, who very recently took over as acting secretary of the Navy after former secretary Richard Spencer resigned, said at the US Naval Institute Defense Forum this week, Military.com reports.

"I think his concerns are justified because the ship is very, very expensive and it needs to work," he added, explaining that there is a "trail of tears as to why we are where we are, but we need to fix that ship and make sure that it works."

Modly assured the audience that fixing the Ford would be a top priority. "There is nothing worse than a ship like this being out there ... as a metaphor and a whipping boy for why the Navy can't do anything right," he said, according to the outlet.

The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford steams in the Atlantic Ocean, Oct. 27, 2019.

(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Connor Loessin)

Spencer, Modly's predecessor, had previously staked his job on getting the Ford working properly, promising President Trump that he would get the elevators working by the end of the post-shakedown availability or the president could fire him.

The PSA ended in October with only a handful of elevators operational. The Ford is currently going through post-delivery tests and trials, with plans for the elevator issues to be sorted over this 18-month period.

As Spencer was questioned about accountability, the former Navy secretary sharply criticized the Navy's primary shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), accusing the company of having "no idea" what it was doing with the Ford.

Gerald R. Ford under construction at Huntington Ingalls Industries-Newport News Shipbuilding.

(U.S. Navy photo by Ricky Thompson)

Now, the Ford's challenges have fallen in Modly's lap.

"Everything that the Ford should be able to do is going to be a game-changer for us," the acting Navy secretary said, according to Military.com. "We just have to make sure that it can do it because we've got several more coming behind it."

The USS John F. Kennedy, the second Ford-class carrier, was slated to be christened Saturday. The Navy has two more of the new supercarriers on the way after that.

This article originally appeared on Business Insider. Follow @BusinessInsider on Twitter.