Sailors Prepare Ike for INSURV

The anchors have been reinstalled, the “69” lights are up and running on the ship’s superstructure, and various other teams remain busy with preservation, restoration and reinstallation of the systems that make the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) (Ike) run.

Among the ship’s many docking planned incremental availability period (DPIA) projects, the ship’s cableway improvement team’s task of pulling miles and miles of cables throughout the ship reached its completion, June 16.

The cableway team removed 6,450 dead-end cables from the cableways throughout the ship, which is equivalent to 225,700 feet (48.4 miles) of cable. They pulled 188 of those cables to assist VT Milcom with the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) installation. The cableway team completed all its DPIA jobs ahead of schedule and without any need for rework.

“We were the ones tasked with removing dead-end cables and going through the whole ship inspecting it in preparation for [the Board of Inspection and Survey] (INSURV) ship qualification process,” said Chief Electronics Technician Gregory Reno, the cableway team leader.

The team consisted of 30 Sailors (three first class petty officers, eight second class petty officers, 13 third class petty officers and six E-3 and below Sailors) from the ship’s Combat Systems, Air and Engineering departments.

“Our team did a lot of good,” said Information Systems Technician 1st Class Francis Bartoszak, a cableway team member. “Together we pulled more than 200,000 feet of cable. I feel good knowing we had a good group of people who could bring the ship back into standards for INSURV.”

Bartoszak is one of two team members who created a database to track all the cableway jobs the team performed ahead of Ike’s inspection. They used the database to track man hours and help schedule outstanding maintenance. The team shared the database with the cableway team aboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75). Truman is scheduled to join Ike Norfolk Naval Shipyard later this year.

Dwight D. Eisenhower is scheduled to conclude her current DPIA shipyard period later this year.