Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers - News and Discussion

[SKB]

Reminder: Britain's Biggest Warship Series 2 begins tonight on BBC2 at 20:00.

Preview clip:

[jcs1959]

See navy lookout on twitter, 2 F35b landing at the same time. I may be wrong but I think that is something new. The CVS's surely were too small for this to happen and not seen the US navy do it with their LHD's.

[SKB]

2 F35b landing at the same time.

[Timmymagic]

You’ve missed the rubber deck

The video of that is terrifying. Whats incredible is that no-one cancelled it, it made sense for about 5 minutes, its like no-one looked at the pace of development of jet engines and went 'you know what, in 2-3 years this won't be an issue'...

Eric 'Winkle' Brown was of course involved....still can't fully believe they designed a fighter specifically for it.

[Tempest414]

A lot going on back in the day like the Supermarine Attacker tail wheel jet one of the pilots I used to fly with set the grass airfield they built at on fire with one on a delivery flight

[Timmymagic]

First take-off and landing on a moving ship
Full-length flight deck
Offset island
Catapults
Arrestor gear
Angled flight deck
Landing light system
Ski Jump

Add in armoured decks, having the hangar deck not being the strength deck was a major change for the USN on the Midway Class and of course hurricane bows.

[Ron5]

First take-off and landing on a moving ship
Full-length flight deck
Offset island
Catapults
Arrestor gear
Angled flight deck
Landing light system
Ski Jump

Add in armoured decks, having the hangar deck not being the strength deck was a major change for the USN on the Midway Class and of course hurricane bows.

At last a winner!!!

The docent listed angled deck, steam catapults and the hurricane bow.

[Ron5]

Really I think the only innovations on modern carriers that haven't come from the UK is nuclear power and EMAL Cats

Well then there's the whole thing about inventing the modern aircraft and being the first to fly it off a ship

[Ron5]

We're finding our maritime roots again': Why Britain's biggest warship will give us back our swagger
Daily Telegraph
27 October 2019 • 7:00am

Lowering the white ensign on one generation of Royal Navy aircraft carriers and, a decade later, raising it on another: Vice Admiral Jerry Kyd already holds a unique place in naval history.

In 2010 he was the captain of HMS Ark Royal when the ship was decommissioned in defence cuts which left Britain without an operational aircraft carrier for years. “It was awful,” he recalls. “We had no idea it was coming.”

That winter the Ark Royal sailed on one final emotional voyage around Britain, including a stop in the shipyards of the Tyne where she was built. “About 30 of the old welders who originally put the ship together came on board and they were in tears,” he recalls. “This wasn’t just something felt by the Navy but the nation. She was a flagship and there she was being scrapped.”

Fast forward to the summer of 2018 and Vice Admiral Kyd was once more at the helm of the nation’s greatest warship, the £3.1bn HMS Queen Elizabeth, as the new aircraft carrier embarked on her maiden trans-Atlantic voyage. Her first operational deployment is scheduled for 2021 (to the Asia Pacific region). Last month her sister ship, HMS Prince of Wales, sailed out of Rosyth dockyard for the first time further bolstering Britain’s naval capability.

The 52-year-old, who has since been promoted to Fleet Commander, hopes HMS Queen Elizabeth, which weighs in at 65,000 tons and is three times the size of the Arc Royal, will be “reflective of a new swagger” - one he hopes can shake Britain out of its Brexit-induced torpor and project its strength back out across the globe. “You shape your own luck in life and as a country we shape our own destiny,” he says. “It’s up to us whether we bury our heads in the sand and feel all sorry for ourselves, or stand really proud with our Union flag draped around our shoulders and get out there.”

Celebrating the rebirth of Britain’s aircraft carriers motivated Vice Admiral Kyd to invite film cameras onboard for a new three-part documentary which starts tonight. We meet in Portsmouth the day after Trafalgar Day, the Royal Navy’s annual collective hangover following its celebration marking Lord Nelson’s triumph. Vice Admiral Kyd attended a lunchtime ceremony onboard HMS Victory to coincide with the exact moment he was fatally struck by a French musket ball, before hosting the Defence Secretary and other luminaries for dinner.

Jerry Kyd is a naval man through and through. He joined up in 1985 as a Seaman Officer and has served on operational deployments all over the globe. He nurses the hope that one of his four sons, aged between 15 and 20, might follow in his footsteps. His wife, meanwhile, works as a GP in Portsmouth. Many of her patients are the families of his crews.

The attachment to Lord Nelson, he insists, is far more than purely ceremonial. As well as embodying the qualities any modern Royal Naval officer should aspire to, the need to defend Britain’s interests remains equally pressing. Vice Admiral Kyd points to the huge expansion of the Russian fleet and China’s own extensive aircraft carrier building programme (with three already complete and more in the pipeline). “It is wishful thinking in the extreme that we’ve suddenly pressed the pause button on state on state war,” he says. “I see no evidence of that. Unless someone with a magic wand suddenly comes along and changes human nature we will perpetually be in a state of competition, if not conflict, with other countries and factions.”

He admits he is “totally” scared at the technological arms race currently underway. “The nuclear revolution is bad enough [for] mass destruction but the 21st century is a very different world we are entering.” Instead of carpet bombing of civilians, he says, expect cyber and targeted missile attacks which could “bring the financial system to book” and devastate national infrastructure. “When it goes state on state proper it will be very short, extremely harsh and attack every element of society,” he says. “That to me is the scary element. Populations at home, I don’t think, fully understand how vulnerable they will be to a proper state on state war.”

In Nelson’s day victory was assured to whoever could fire the most rounds the fastest, but success in the modern era relies on the speed of decision-making: known in defence parlance as the ‘kill-chain’. Increasingly countries are turning to artificial intelligence and robotics to bolster their military while an arm’s race is currently underway to understand quantum science – a new paradigm shift in technology which hugely speeds up computer processing power.

Earlier this week the US President's daughter Ivanka Trump tweeted that their country had achieved ‘quantum supremacy’, though Kyd points out China has already launched a satellite which can create an unbreakable communications network based on the technology. Citing the dystopian science fiction of the Terminator films, he admits he is deeply concerned about the danger of ceding autonomy to robots to wage war. “The machine speed decision making will test the human dynamic right to the extremes and we are going to be in some really interesting waters in the next 20-30 years about how you wage war and control waging war,” he says. “The ethical element is going to be really challenging.”

‘Big Lizzie’ – as she is affectionately known - relies upon a state-of-the-art weapon handling system with missiles shunted around by robots like an Amazon warehouse doing the work of 200 ship hands. Drones are already being used with numerous other unmanned aerial and waterborne vehicles in the pipeline. “I’m very confident in 20 years [both aircraft carriers] will be racked, stacked and packed with unmanned systems powered through AI and quantum,” he says.

Restoring the pride of Britain’s fleet has required some creative accounting. Vice Admiral Kyd describes it as “a plan to keep the pilot light alive” by sharing resources with the RAF and relying on key allies, in particular the US and France, to help continue training over the past decade.

HMS Queen Elizabeth is particularly dependent on US co-operation. On her first operational deployment she will carry a squadron of US F-35 lightning jets as well as RAF versions of the same supersonic stealth jet. Given the reliance on the US military I wonder what he makes of President Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds in Syria and the readiness with which he abandoned a key ally? “The history of us fighting side by side with the US is without parallel,” he says. “That runs deep.”

In 2018 that special relationship was put somewhat under strain following the arrest of six crew members for drunk and disorderly behaviour after the ship docked at the US port of Jacksonville. The story was widely picked up across the press with reports one of the crew ended up being tasered but Vice Admiral Kyd quickly closed ranks. The police, he tells me, were “mortified” by an incident he describes as “totally blown out of proportion”.

The following year another scandal rocked the boat when Vice Admiral Kyd’s successor as captain, Commodore Nick Cooke-Priest, was removed from his post for supposedly misusing his official car. He has since resigned from the Navy. On this incident Vice Admiral Kyd is rather more circumspect. “The Royal Navy is a very sophisticated organisation and doesn’t take any administrative action like that lightly,” he says. “When it makes a final judgement right at the very highest levels of service it is done with really careful advice and careful thought.”

Some have questioned the necessity of investing billions in aircraft carrier strike capability but Vice Admiral Kyd points out the programme has been endlessly picked over by the bean counters who deem it represents value for money. “That isn’t just about being ready for war fight but supporting UK diplomacy abroad, promoting British industry and flying the flag,” he says. “In a post Brexit world that is really important."

From the tears on the Tyne to the thousands who greeted HMS Queen Elizabeth into Portsmouth for the first time, he has witnessed at first-hand the affection Britain holds for its warships. After years in the wilderness he says “we are finding again our maritime roots” and sailing back out into the world.

Britain's Biggest Warship Goes to Sea begins on BBC Two on Sunday at 8pm

[djkeos]

Really I think the only innovations on modern carriers that haven't come from the UK is nuclear power and EMAL Cats

I was thinking of the deck-edge elevator as well...

[Jake1992]

Really I think the only innovations on modern carriers that haven't come from the UK is nuclear power and EMAL Cats

I was thinking of the deck-edge elevator as well...

Is that really an innovation though or just changing the location of the lifts ? I personally think the latter

[Little J]

Well then there's the whole thing about inventing the modern aircraft and being the first to fly it off a ship

Forgive my denseness... Modern aircraft?

[seaspear]

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/euge ... ?r=US&IR=T
Was this what was meant as first aircraft launch certainly the I.J.S Hosho was the first purpose designed carrier to be commissiones in 1922 ahead of H.M.S Hermes ,H.M.S Ark Royal was a converted coal carrier used during the Dardelles campaign
I am adding this info just to add some historical context to the development of the carrier ,certainly it was the early aviators like general Billy Mitchell in demonstration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell who showed some foresight who may be described as the fathers of carrier aviation

[Timmymagic]

Is that really an innovation though or just changing the location of the lifts ? I personally think the latter

It's as much an innovation as the angled deck in many respects. I guess we could say that the RN's switch to electrically powered, chain driven elevators is a recent innovation, its a massive positive shift from hydraulic lifts. One thing I can't find out is if the USN went with electromagnetic lifts on the Ford Class, They reduced the number from 4 to 3, but can't find out if they made this change.

https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/215638

Well then there's the whole thing about inventing the modern aircraft and being the first to fly it off a ship

We might have to give you that...it's all about the landing though...

[Ron5]

Well then there's the whole thing about inventing the modern aircraft and being the first to fly it off a ship

Forgive my denseness... Modern aircraft?

Think Wrights not Montgolfiers

[SKB]

Last night's Britain's Biggest Warship (S2E1) for those who missed it. Watch it quickly before its taken down from Youtube!

[Ron5]

Excellent documentary. Commentator was really good, informative without being obtrusive. Thanks for posting.

[PhillyJ]

Excellent documentary. Commentator was really good, informative without being obtrusive. Thanks for posting.

Agree, I was not aware of the incident with the Harrier and ejection tragedy that Commander Nathan Grey had earlier in his career.

[inch]

I wonder how our great pals USMC are liking hmsqe onboard and their first impressions of her as a platform for them as well as rn ?

[SKB]

I wonder how our great pals USMC are liking hmsqe onboard and their first impressions of her as a platform for them as well as rn ?

[bobp]

That Super Stallion needs a decent paint job.

[Ron5]

That Super Stallion needs a decent paint job.

Handsome is that handsome does

[PhillyJ]

That Super Stallion needs a decent paint job.

Handsome is that handsome does

Someone posted this on Twitter about it. "It’s a test and evaluation airframe from MCAS New River. Affectionately known as the “Frankenstein” 53 because of the colour!"

[Ron5]

That Super Stallion needs a decent paint job.

Handsome is that handsome does

Someone posted this on Twitter about it. "It’s a test and evaluation airframe from MCAS New River. Affectionately known as the “Frankenstein” 53 because of the colour!"

I would think the nickname is more because it's made up of several bits of other dead aircraft.

[serge750]

Well according to twitter a couple of F35 from the USMC have arrived !!!