In 2012 (5 years after contract award and after all the learning difficulties should have been solved) we were told ASC would deliver AWDs within budget - within a year that was $300M+ over and has increased year by year to $1B+.
I have friends who work at ASC who told me one ASC AWD (Hobart) superstructure block had to be opened up after being built because the equipment to be installed would not fit through the door. THEN - the same thing happened again on the same block for Perth. That is why AWD has sucked money from the rest of the Defence Budget.
If BAE overspends on a project BAE shareholders pay. If ASC makes a mistake we taxpayers foot the bill, or it is taken out of projects that should be protecting our Army or Air Force!
There were multiple late design changes, i.e. the updated design data (drawings were delivered after the work had been completed to the original drawings, this was an issue all block subcontractors had to deal with, including Navantia and is a completely separate issue to the substandard and incomplete work BAE delivered on the keel block for Hobart.
As for your mates who worked at ASC telling you well you find tossers everywhere, I had the miss fortune of sitting near one who used to lecture everyone in ear shot about how incompetent everyone was, not because of what he had seen but because of what he had read in the Murdock press, he also used to tell my how bad the Aussie automotive industry was and how they deserved to shut down, yet he was one of the lazy production workers he was complaining about, again be cause it was the line of his preferred commentators / politicians. Then again he was also a baby boomer looking to early retirement having sat on his backside his entire life complaining about the efforts of others while doing sweet FA himself.
In review the ITPs for the first block from BAE, very pretty, very well laid out and listed everything they had been completed and tested, which was virtually nothing, i.e. 90% of the inspections and tests listed were marked incomplete, or NA. When flushing pipework allegedly completed and tested (one of the few things they claim to have done) they couldn't be flushed properly as the pipes were blocked, directional valves were installed back to front, some valves couldn't be operated because the valve bodies were fouled by rags, gloves etc. Things were so bad the decision was made to inspect and test every pipe segment as there was no confidence any of them were correct and even the suspicion of sabotage. A number of additional videoscopes were acquired and things got even worse from there with scoring from contaminants even weld spatter being found not just in the pipes but in the valves.
As for the schedule slip it was on the news back in 2012 with Stephan Smith slipping the schedule as part of the failed attempt to achieve a budget surplus. Not only was recruitment frozen but a significant number of people were made redundant, not just ASC but DMO as well. Instead of training their teams to undertake the concurrent activities necessary to meet schedule, senior technicians, coordinators etc. found themselves doing the work on their own, instead of parallel activities everything ended up being done in series with the same, smaller teams moving from job to job.
Whinging and sooking and making up stories doesn't change what happened and why, BAE management screwed the pooch and were replaced as a result. Their performance was so bad that even with a new federal government with an agenda to destroy ASC, an Anglophile PM who instructed the Defmin to make BAE prime in place of the Alliance, and a Defmin who had been wined and dined by BAE who was determined to do so, they still couldn't get it across the line because it was too widely known that BAE was not capable of the job. There are some great operators at BAE and they were embarrassed by the performance and behaviour of their masters. I can't say I ever visited Williamstown, I was meant to but as I was one of the people reporting on their F ups they refused to let me on site, in fac that's one of my proudest achievements, because it was a badge of honour within Test and Activation to have an incompetent supplier or contractor ban us from their premises and complain to the government about us.
Do you know BAE weren't even the worst performers, most of the worst of the worst were actually Navantias approved supply chain, including the mob who supplied mild steel hydraulic tanks instead of the specified stainless ones, or the copper pipe supplier who subcontracted to a Chinese mill that was incapable of drawing pipe of consistent section or wall thickness.
Time for a fact check Steve. The F100 was selected because it was meant to be an existing design that could be built to print, it wasn't. Experienced subcontractors were selected for the complex keel blocks without supervision or intervention to avoid delaying the project as it was vital these be ready first to consolidate the rest of the build onto. The existing Navantia supply chain was used to avoid the need to evaluate suppliers ourselves. The primary risks were seen to be the changes to the combat system and the associated changes to the design to incorporate them as well as the required integration and test effort on the RAN specific requirements. Ironically all the bespoke stuff went well because effort was assigned to make sure it worked, it was the stuff that had been left to giant, international groups, who were meant to be expert in those areas, that fell over.
Hobart is the first ship built at the ASC shipyard, which wasn't even completed until 2010 just before first steel was cut, how many ships has Williamstown built? How many keels? How is it that the biggest stuff ups on the platform came from what was supposedly the most experienced and capable yard? How is it that all most all the rework required on non BAE block related to changing design not build error? Go apply for a job at the Murdoch press Steve, because you sure as hell don't know much about ship building.
