Austal USA Starts Construction on Third Heritage-Class OPC, USCGC Ingham

Austal USA, the American arm of Australian shipbuilder Austal, has begun construction on its third Heritage-class Offshore Patrol Cutter for the US Coast Guard, the future USCGC Ingham, at its Mobile, Alabama yard.

At a Glance

Austal USA started work on Ingham, the third OPC under its own Stage 2 contract, on August 28, 2026.
The contract can grow to as many as 11 hulls, with a potential value of $3.3 billion.
The ship measures 360 feet (110 m), with a range of 10,200 nautical miles at 14 knots and 60 days of endurance.
Mission set: law enforcement support, drug and migrant interdiction, search and rescue, and command-and-control for surge response.
Austal’s Mobile yard now has three OPCs — Pickering, Icarus and Ingham — under construction simultaneously.

Background

The Heritage-class OPC program is meant to replace the Coast Guard’s aging 270- and 210-foot medium-endurance cutters and ranks among the largest single acquisition line items in the service’s history. The first four hulls were awarded to Eastern Shipbuilding Group back in 2016, but Hurricane Michael’s 2018 landfall in Florida badly disrupted the yard’s output. The follow-on batch of up to 11 hulls — Stage 2 — was rebid in 2022, and Austal USA won it with a price of roughly $330 million per ship. In July 2025, the Department of Homeland Security partially terminated Eastern’s contract for hulls three and four over delays and cost overruns; a resolution for the first two hulls (including Argus) is still being negotiated.

Against that backdrop, Austal’s ships form a separate numbering track within its own Stage 2 award rather than the program’s overall hull sequence. With Ingham now underway, Austal has three OPCs on the line at once — a sign the yard has ramped up its build tempo quickly. Each ship is designed to operate independently or alongside a task group, and to serve as a mobile command-and-control platform during surge events like hurricane response or mass-migration incidents.

Regional Impact

There’s no direct Turkish procurement link here, but the OPC program’s shipyard swap and years of delay illustrate a broader risk in large naval-platform programs: over-reliance on a single yard. That makes Turkey’s own push for multi-yard capacity and delivery discipline on programs like MİLGEM, TF-2000 and MİLDEN a useful point of comparison against what the US has gone through. It’s also worth noting that Austal itself is an Australian-founded builder with a growing US footprint — part of a broader trend of allied shipbuilders integrating deeper into the American defense-industrial supply chain.

FAQ

Which hull number is Ingham? It’s the third ship Austal USA has started under its own Stage 2 contract; earlier hulls built by Eastern Shipbuilding are counted separately in the program’s overall sequence.

Is a delivery date set? No official date has been announced yet — construction has only just begun.

Status tag: Official — based on Austal USA’s own press materials and US Coast Guard contract records.

Sources

Naval Today, “Construction starts on third US Coast Guard Heritage-class OPC” (August 28, 2026)
Offshore Source, “Austal USA Kicks Off Hull Three of Heritage-Class OPC Program”
Seapower Magazine, “Austal USA Starts Construction on USCGC INGHAM”
USNI News, Austal/Eastern Shipbuilding contract history reporting