Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) has won a $2.6 billion contract for the refueling and complex overhaul of the nuclear aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), according to a Friday release from the Pentagon.
The passage of last week’s Consolidated and Further Continuation Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (HR 933) allowed funds for the U.S. Navy to fund the work at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.
Initial work for the Lincoln RCOH was begun by HII in February with $92 million in funds from FY 2012, NAVSEA officials told USNI News at the time.
Each Nimitz-class carrier undergoes a four-year RCOH at the halfway point in its 50-year service life. Without the refueling, Lincoln would not have been deployable, according to Navy officials.
The delay in Lincoln’s refueling was one of the most visible effects of the battles over the defense budget in the last six weeks. Along with the Navy’s carrier presence reduction in the Middle East, the delay in the RCOH was one of the most cited examples of the effects of budget belt tightening in the Pentagon.
