Navy to look at experimental hull
| • | Graphic: Navatek goes military |
By John Duchemin
Advertiser Staff Writer
Honolulu ship engineering firm Pacific Marine has landed a $6.3 million Navy contract to fit a warship with a new experimental hull, a project that puts Pacific Marine subsidiary Navatek in contention to be a designer of a new generation of Navy ships.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
The hull, a product of nearly two decades of research and a hybrid of earlier Navatek designs, would be attached to the Navy's 160-foot, 340-ton "surface effect ship," a flat-topped craft designed in the early 1980s as an experimental patrol and support ship. The project should be finished in 2002, Pacific Marine officials said.
The Navy's surface effect ship (SES) was designed for $100 million in the early 1980's as a fast patrol and support ship, but perfomed poorly. The ship was mothballed until the Navy donated it to Pacific Marine.
With the new contract, Pacific Marine hopes to demonstrate that its small-scale experimental hulls can be adapted for use on larger vessels, including warships and passenger ferries, said Steven Loui, company president and owner.
One goal is to prove the hull could be a base for the proposed "littoral combat ship." This 200-foot Navy ship would carry helicopters and missiles, help evacuate wounded troops, and serve as an offshore depot, with enough range to make long-distance voyages but enough speed to serve as a patrol vessel.
"This gives us a chance to show, in a relatively inexpensive way, that Navatek hulls can be used on real military missions," Loui said.
Navatek also hopes to design a fast, stable passenger ferry based on the same technology, Loui said.
Navatek is the designer of vessels such as the Navatek I and Navatek II tour boats and the experimental Wiki Wiki ferry, which ran between Leeward O'ahu and downtown Honolulu.
Navatek's hull designs are known by such acronyms as SWATH, for "small waterplane-area twin hull"; SLICE, which is a faster version of SWATH; and MIDFOIL, an upgraded version with shallower draft and hydrofoil features. Among common features, the main bodies of the boats are several feet above the water, supported on a system of struts, catamaran hulls and/or buoyant underwater pods and winglike "lifting bodies."
This type of construction means that a minimal portion of the boat's hull is actually touching the water's surface — where the roughest wave action is — giving the boats greater stability than traditional mono-hull or catamaran boats, and at relatively high speeds.
The goal for the Navy ship is to provide speeds in excess of 35 nautical miles per hour, while maintaining enough stability in rough seas to land helicopters on the flat deck.
Pacific Marine wants the Navy to use its hull design for the littoral combat ship, which would act as an off-shore support ship for fleet and ground operations.
Navatek is competing with many other ship designers to propose hull designs for the littoral combat ship.
Navatek's hull forms have shown promise as the base for such a boat, said an official at the Office of Naval Research, which is financing the Navatek project for the Navy.
"Pacific Marine is the only shipyard in the country doing R&D on hull forms like that," said Gary Jensen, director of the Honolulu branch of the Office of Naval Research. "Certainly they've come up with one of the more attractive designs we've seen."
Whether Navatek gets to design the littoral combat ship could boil down to the availability of more federal money, Jensen said.
"But this certainly is an intriguing hull form, and has capabilities the Navy is increasingly looking at," he said.
Pacific Marine, a private Hawai'i corporation, has 450 employees and had sales of $41 million in fiscal 2000.
