Michael Fabey’s new book – Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America’s – explores Huntington Ingalls Industries $HII and its largest shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding...The book takes a hard unvarnished look at the Navy and the challenges civilian shipbuilders faced while building the world’s newest and most lethal ship, America’s Ford-class supercarriers...Heavy Metal demonstrates how difficult it is to run an industrial business in America, especially one that relies on a single customer and especially when that customer is the US Navy, which likes expensive, untested technology and floods shipyards with strange requests and lots of bureaucratic requirements...Overall, while it’s difficult to keep track of all the people mentioned in this book and Fabey fails to include HII’s fight with Wall Street, it’s a solid read...It’s also an important read...Fabey is correct in noting that public awareness of the shipyard is critical for Congressional support and his book does a great job shining a light on this underreported, yet critically important to maritime security and the commerce, segment of our industry.
Newport News Shipbuilding has been in business for a long time, constructing commercial and military ships at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay...In times past, the work was piecemeal, highly specialized, and clumsily coordinated, 'leading to delays, misinterpretations, and production miscues'...These days, writes Fabey, much of the work of shipbuilding has shifted to the digital realm, leading to fewer such problems...Still, as he notes, there are plenty of other hurdles and headaches attendant in building a warship, especially in light of the fact that China is now floating an aircraft carrier (bought, ironically, from Ukraine), that add urgency to the work...Fabey’s storyline plods at times, especially in technical matters...Even so, the text is a definitively thorough portrait of how a ship comes into being...In the hands of a John McPhee, the tale would have more zip, but it’s clear that a fitting amount of hard work and thought went into it, as befits the complex nature of the subject...A sometimes labored but deep-diving contribution to marine engineering and transportation history.
Journalist Fabey (Crashback) chronicles the construction of the USS John F. Kennedy at a Newport News, Va., shipyard in this richly detailed account...Noting that the ship, which was launched in 2019, is considered the world’s most technologically advanced aircraft carrier, Fabey interweaves details of its design, financing, and construction with geopolitical analysis...But the book’s greatest strength is Fabey’s up-close profiles of the welders, painters, steelworkers, and riggers who started assembling the John F. Kennedy in 2011...He conveys the physical and mental toll of their work, which often takes place hundreds of feet in the air or in below-deck cabins 'just a bit bigger than a coffin' and requires mastering new technologies and meeting difficult deadlines despite bad weather...Fabey also empathetically portrays the workers’ fears of layoffs, illnesses, injuries, and mistakes, as well as the satisfaction they take in contributing to the national defense...This poignant portrait of working-class life will appeal to fans of Studs Terkel.
