Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers

by Michael Fabey

Overview

An extraordinary story of American can-do, an inside look at the building of the most dangerous aircraft carrier in the world, the John F. Kennedy.

Tip the Empire State Building onto its side and you’ll have a sense of the length of the United States Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the most powerful in the world: the USS John F. Kennedy. Weighing 100,000 tons, Kennedy features the most futuristic technology ever put to sea, making it the most agile and lethal global weapon of war.

Only one place possesses the brawn, brains and brass to transform naval warfare with such a creation – the Newport News Shipbuilding yard in Virginia and its 30,000 employees and shipyard workers. This is their story, the riggers, fitters, welders, electricians, machinists and other steelworkers who built the next-generation aircraft carrier. 

Heavy Metal puts us on the waterfront and into the lives of these men and women as they battle layoffs, the elements, impossible deadlines, extraordinary pressure, workplace dangers and a pandemic to complete a ship that will be essential to protect America’s way of life.

The city of Newport News owes its very existence to the company that bears its name. The shipyard dominates the town—physically, politically, financially, socially, and culturally. Thanks to the yard, the city grew from a backwater to be the home of the premier naval contractor in the United States.

Heavy Metal captures an indelible moment in the history of a shipyard, a city, and a country.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062996251
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/14/2022
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	621,752
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Michael Fabey has reported on military and naval affairs for most of his career. In his work for National Geographic Traveler, the Economist Group, Defense News, Aviation Week, and Janes, he has collected more than two dozen reporting awards, including the prestigious Timothy White Award. Few journalists have had as much firsthand experience of America’s naval ships and aircraft and the officers who command them. He is the author of Crashback: The Power Clash Between the US and China in the Pacific. A Philadelphia native, he currently resides in Spotsylvania, Virginia. 

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Prologue 1

1 Steel City 7

2 Outclassed 27

3 Steel Vets 50

4 Labor Gains 64

5 Metal Data 90

6 Setting Precedents 121

7 Trade Wars 134

8 Weapons Await 153

9 Trump Card 173

10 The Flood Cometh 188

11 Blame Game 210

12 Caroline, Again 222

13 On Course 235

14 Covid Carrier 246

15 A Matter of Culture 263

16 Ship Shape 284

Abbreviations Glossary 303

Acknowledgments 305

Photo Insert Credits 307

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2022

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. For example, he highlights the ship’s symbolic and practical importance both as a counter to China’s buildup of naval power and as a sign of the U.S. government’s commitment to domestic manufacturing and to preserving the historical shipbuilding center of Newport News. 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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Journalist Fabey (Crashback) chronicles the construction of the USS John F. Kennedy at a Newport News, Va., shipyard in this richly detailed account… 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." — Publishers Weekly

“Heavy Metal, which plows sturdily through the swells and troughs of big-ticket ship construction, does a noble thing in affirming that nowhere else in the world has this species of freedom been built so well and for so long.” — Wall Street Journal

“A deep-diving contribution to marine engineering and transportation history.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Heavy Metal presents a fresh, sympathetic perspective on the human aspects of the shipbuilding industry. It is an excellent read for anyone looking to understand the technology behind the design and construction of the Gerald R. Ford-class carriers. This book would be useful to crews preparing for complex shipyard periods.” — U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings 

“One can hardly read this book without thinking that the nation owes those shipbuilders far more than it knows.” — Daily Press 

From the Publisher

2022-05-05
Maritime journalist Fabey takes a close look at the building of a new kind of aircraft carrier.

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. Newport News had been busily working on the first of its new-generation nuclear-powered carriers, the Gerald R. Ford; throughout Fabey’s account, it adds to the new class with CVN-79, in time formally named the John F. Kennedy. At seemingly every turn, the shipbuilders face difficulty. It’s hard work to begin with, but then there are change orders from the Pentagon, labor-management conflicts, political currents that push for a bigger Navy on the one hand and belt-tightening on the other, the pandemic, and technical failures, “common enough for a new ship class, but the testing of this one dragged on and on, because it took longer than they thought it would to find and fix all the issues.” 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.

Kirkus Reviews