U.S. Navy secures long-term support for EMALS catapult system

The U.S. Navy has awarded Kato Engineering a $49.3 million contract to keep maintaining the power system behind the electromagnetic catapults on its Ford-class aircraft carriers, covering engineering support, repairs and spare-parts sourcing through 2031.

The contract covers the Energy Storage Subsystem of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, the technology that replaced traditional steam catapults on the Navy’s newest carriers. Kato Engineering, based in North Mankato, Minnesota, will handle most of the work at its home plant, with smaller shares performed in Portsmouth, Virginia, and Lakehurst, New Jersey. The contract structure is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity agreement, meaning the Navy will issue individual task orders as needs arise rather than pay the full amount upfront, and no money has been obligated yet. Naval Air Systems Command awarded the deal without competition, since Kato built the original hardware and remains the only source with the technical knowledge to sustain it.

EMALS uses a linear induction motor and stored electrical energy instead of steam pressure to fling aircraft off a carrier’s deck. The Energy Storage Subsystem is the part that makes that possible: a motor generator, a control tower and a power supply that together store energy and then release up to 60 megajoules, or 60 megawatts at peak, in the roughly two to three seconds it takes to launch a jet. That burst of power is comparable to what it would take to run thousands of homes for an instant. Each Ford-class carrier needs 12 of these units, since its four catapults share several energy storage and power conversion systems rather than each having its own dedicated set.

Kato has built these motor generators since the system’s earliest testing, completing the first full-size unit for factory acceptance testing back in 2008. EMALS first went to sea aboard USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), and it took years of software tuning and hardware fixes to work through reliability problems that dogged the system early on. In 2022, the Pentagon’s testing office found EMALS was falling well short of its reliability target, managing only around 600 launch cycles between failures against a goal of more than 4,000. The Navy and General Atomics, EMALS’s original developer, have continued refining the system since then, and reliability figures have improved as more carriers and more flight hours accumulate.

This new contract focuses specifically on keeping the fielded system running rather than fixing design flaws, covering ongoing maintenance, technical support, and the tricky problem of sourcing parts for components that may fall out of production over the system’s service life. That work matters more as the Ford class grows: USS Gerald R. Ford is already in service, USS John F. Kennedy (CVN 79) is in the fitting-out stage, and USS Enterprise (CVN 80) and USS Doris Miller (CVN 81) are both under construction, putting the Navy on track to operate four EMALS-equipped carriers by the early 2030s.

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