A small Alabama shipyard is among three sharing in a $280 million initiative to build prototype landing craft for the U.S. Navy.
The Navy announced this week that it had awarded “Prototype Other Transaction agreements” to three shipyards to work on the LCU 1700 class of landing craft. One of them is Master Boat Builders, which is based in Coden, Ala., in south Mobile County.
Master Boat and the two other selected shipyards are not the first to build LCU 1700s. In fact, Navy officials came to Mobile in August to take delivery of LCU 1710, the first ship in the class, which was built at Austal USA…