The Navy's cutting-edge method of launching aircraft faces reliability issues

For more than 60 years, the U.S. Navy has relied on steam power to catapult planes off the decks of aircraft carriers, leaving behind a trail of steam rising from the track.

A new generation of carriers will rely on something far more technologically complex: an electromagnetic system that could launch more aircraft off the deck and at a faster rate than traditional steam methods.

But development of this technology, built by San Diego defense firm General Atomics, has not been without growing pains. And the system's readiness, and that of other new systems on the USS Gerald R. Ford, the first of a new class of carriers, is at the center