So the case is EMALS had a few corners cut when it was put in. Long story short it’s isolation issues. The old steam systems could isolate a track, the electrical system is just one big unified thing. So on steam, a track goes down they can just turn off that track and keep launching on the others. On the electrical one track goes down, they have to shut the whole thing off, zero aircraft get launched.

There’s already contracts to fix this issue being put out. But this happens with Government projects. Corners get cut to hit a deadline, those cut corners then come back to haunt everyone.

And the thing is what the Government sees isn’t the whole picture. They’re looking at the metric of “number of planes system got into the air”. Which I’m sure we all understand averages here. If a system is getting a 0/hour when one track goes down, that zero brings that average down hard.

But very few want to go back to steam. It’s very costly, requires a lot of very specialized equipment to house all the high pressure systems, and some drones we toss into the air with these systems aren’t made to take the sudden thrust steam gives it. The EMALS system can give a very clean and well defined ramp up for thrust that drone engineers can build around.

But this is one of those things where some wise guy’s cut corners idea starts to threaten a full project because people start getting all worried about sunk costs and what not. But the electrical system is flawed, but we can work around those flaws to bring better isolation to it. It’s just going to take time because… you know, it’s a military vessel, it’s kind of hard to be like “let’s just drag it out of an active war zone and dry dock it for half a year.” Clocks tick differently on projects like that.

But going back to steam, and to be fair it took a while to properly develop those systems as well, is less than ideal. It’s got a much high cost and takes a whole lot more maintenance to keep running. And some aircraft we’d have to yank off duty and fix them to handle steam’s level of yeeting things. But Congress and what not aren’t looking at that dollar metric, they’re mostly focused on “how many aircraft did the system on average get into the air?”

But to be fair here, we are talking about some dude who decided to level an entire wing of the White House before actually going through any kind of approval or formalizing any kind of plan. So… He’s consistent in that whole doing shit and thinking about it later.