Newport News Shipbuilding
Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS), a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, is the sole designer, builder, and refueler of aircraft carriers and one of two providers of submarines for the United States Navy.
Between 1907 and 1923, Newport News built six of the US Navy's total of 22 dreadnoughts – USS Delaware, Texas, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Maryland and West Virginia.
[citation needed] In 1914 NNS built SS Medina for the Mallory Steamship Company; as MV Doulos she was until 2009 the world's oldest active ocean-faring passenger ship.
In May 1915 while traveling to England on shipyard business aboard RMS Lusitania, Hopkins died when that ship was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat[6] off Queenstown on the Irish coast.
After the war, in 1922, Henry Huntington acquired it from the government, and helped facilitate the sale of the homes to shipyard employees and other local residents.
[citation needed] After World War I NNS completed a major reconditioning and refurbishment of the ocean liner SS Leviathan.
Before the war she had been the German liner Vaterland, but the start of hostilities found her laid up in New York Harbor and she had been seized by the US Government in 1917 and converted into a troopship.
War duty and age meant that all wiring, plumbing, and interior layouts were stripped and redesigned while her hull was strengthened and her boilers converted from coal to oil while being refurbished.
[citation needed] In 1927 NNS launched the world's first significant turbo-electric ocean liner: Panama Pacific Line's 17,833 GRT SS California.
[10] At the time she was also the largest merchant ship yet built in the United States,[10] although she was a modest size compared with the biggest European liners of her era.
SS America was launched in 1939 and entered service with United States lines shortly before World War II but soon returned to the shipyard for conversion to a troopship, USS West Point.
[11] In the post-war years NNS built the passenger liner SS United States, which set a transatlantic speed record that still stands today.
[12] In 2007, the US Navy found that workers had used the incorrect metal to fuse together pipes and joints on submarines under construction and this could have eventually led to cracking and leaks.
In 2009 it was found that bolts and fasteners in weapons-handling systems on four Navy submarines, New Mexico, North Carolina, Missouri, and California, were installed incorrectly, delaying the launching of the boats while the problems were corrected.
[15] Such a merger would have eliminated competition for the production of Virginia-class submarines, which have only been made by Newport News and GD subsidiary Electric Boat.
