HMS Prince of Wales Homecoming Publication

HMS PRINCE OF WALES C o m m e m o r a t i n g t h e H o m e c o m i n g o f H M S P R I N C E O F WA L E S

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A national endeavour delivered by this generation for the next We are proud to support the two largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy.

To the men and women who will serve on HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales for the next 50 years, we salute you.

And to our workforce at Rosyth, thank you.

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Proud to play our part We are proud to have led the design, build and integration of the most powerful warships ever constructed for the Royal Navy.

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or centuries ships bearing the name of Prince of Wales have served our nation with distinction. In 1778 a ship of that name successfully defended St Lucia from superior forces. In 1805 her successor scuppered Napoleon’s invasion plans. In 1915 a ship titled Prince of Wales supported the Allied landings in the Dardanelles, while in 1941 a battleship with the same moniker carried our great Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the historic Atlantic Charter meeting with President Roosevelt. So when the newest Prince of Wales sails proudly into her homeport of Portsmouth she will carry an enormous weight of expectation on her shoulders.

But never has a vessel from these shores been better equipped to bear such a burden. For this is no ordinary ship. Our new 65,000 tonne carrier, alongside her sister vessel, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is the most powerful surface craft ever built in the United Kingdom. Armed to the teeth with fifth generation Lightning stealth fighters and able to range in excess of 7,000 nautical miles, she has an unparalleled ability to project power and influence across the seven seas. And with one carrier always available at very high readiness, it gives Britain the means to respond to danger at any place or any time of our choosing for decades to come.

HMS Prince of Wales symbolises more than Britain’s maritime might; she signals our increasing international influence. Whether deployed as part of carrier strike groups or alongside other joint assets in support of amphibious operations, HMS Prince of Wales will lend greater clout to our international allies and strengthen NATO capability at a time of increasing global uncertainty.

Finally, HMS Prince of Wales is a floating showcase of Britain’s engineering excellence, taking six UK shipyards, 700 companies, 11,000 experts, and a vast supply chain millions of hours to construct her. From the banks of the Clyde to the shores of the River Torridge, this has been a truly nationwide enterprise. We owe everyone involved an enormous debt of gratitude.

And as we look forward to her maiden voyage, I’ve no doubt HMS Prince of Wales’ homecoming will be cheered not just by our sailors, our industry partners, and our international allies, but by the country as a whole. For her arrival heralds the dawn of a new age of maritime power. An age in which Global Britain can call on a formidable future phalanx of frigates, destroyers, OPVs and Dreadnought submarines with our carrier flagships, at long last, leading from the front. An age in which we return to our roots as a great trading nation with the power and the poise to defend our prosperity, reach out to our allies and deter every danger in pursuit of a more peaceful world. And an age in which we show allies and adversaries alike the best of British while adding glorious new chapters to the history of our proud maritime nation.

Rt Hon Ben Wallace MP Secretary of State for Defence

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HMS Queen Elizabeth

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n August 2017, Britain’s maritime capability took a huge leap forward with the first entry of HMS Queen Elizabeth into Portsmouth. Now, HMS Prince of Wales is following in her wake to make her first visit to her home port, transforming Britain’s carrier power and placing us at the forefront of maritime aviation.

The Aircraft Carrier Alliance and the teams at Rosyth and around the UK have gone from strength to strength in delivering these ships. I commend them, and the men and women of the Royal Navy who have worked alongside them to deliver such a remarkable feat of engineering.

These ships are the first aircraft carriers in the world to be designed around fifth-generation strike fighter aircraft, but their technology goes far beyond current capabilities.

They are designed to embrace new innovations and over the course of their lives, I expect them to remain at the cutting edge of maritime aviation.

HMS Prince of Wales’s entry into Portsmouth is much more than just the arrival of the second ship in the class, but marks a sea change in Britain’s aircraft carrier capability. Few nations can operate an aircraft carrier; still fewer can deliver continuous carrier strike at sea, and this is the capability that HMS Prince of Wales will provide.

This confirms Britain’s place as the leading European carrier strike nation within NATO. More than this, in an increasingly volatile, uncertain and challenging environment it enables Britain to project its influence worldwide on behalf of the government and our allies. And ‘of course’ these are much more than Royal Navy assets; we will be operating in partnership with the RAF in delivering this capability for the nation. From high-end warfighting to humanitarian assistance, Britain remains ready to deliver on operations anywhere in the world.

This is a proud moment for British maritime power. I am delighted to welcome HMS Prince of Wales to Portsmouth and look forward to the exciting future that she represents.

Admiral Tony Radakin CB, ADC, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff

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or the second time in two years I am delighted to see a Queen Elizabeth-class Aircraft Carrier make its first entry into Portsmouth.

Today’s arrival of HMS Prince of Wales into her home port comes as we near the achievement of the Aircraft Carrier Alliance’s objective to deliver the world’s two most advanced carriers. These will help provide security at sea, international partnership with the UK’s allies, humanitarian assistance and protect our country’s interests across the world for the next 50 years.

HMS Prince of Wales, like HMS Queen Elizabeth, embodies the best in design, engineering and partnership from across the UK. The collaborative working between the public and private sector members of the Alliance has been the cornerstone of this massive undertaking.

I would like to pay special tribute to the skills and hard work of colleagues in Industry, the Royal Navy and the Civil Service across the Alliance which have enabled us to reach today’s very significant milestone. These two aircraft carriers are a great example of the UK’s engineering prowess and ingenuity. Over 10,000 people have worked from the earliest design concept to the construction of the fantastic ship you see today. It is thanks to their efforts, commitment and pride that we have been able to meet the challenging schedule established in 2013.

HMS Prince of Wales has successfully completed her maiden sea trials and will soon be commissioned and accepted by the Royal Navy to join her sister ship as a key element of the UK’s military capability.

The Alliance and its suppliers are proud to have been involved in this great national endeavor to build these two world-class aircraft carriers. We wish them and their crews many years of successful operation and service.

Sir Peter Gershon CBE FREng, Chairman Aircraft Carrier Alliance

Foreword

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fter almost two decades of hard work, perseverance and industrial ingenuity, the regeneration of the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) Carrier Enabled Power Projection (CEPP) capability is almost complete. As HMS Prince of Wales joins her sister ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth in Portsmouth, after having successfully completed a comprehensive set of sea trials, she can now gradually start to take part in the daily drumbeat of the Royal Navy’s (RN’s) activities.

Getting to this stage has been a fantastic achievement by all involved – the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, the Ministry of Defence and, of course, the Royal Navy (RN). Lessons learned from the build programme of the first-in-class, HMS Queen Elizabeth, have meant that the process of building, assembling, fitting out and launching HMS Prince of Wales, has been significantly quicker and more cost effective the second time around. Moreover, support from the aircraft carrier community in France and the United States (US) has meant that precious skills were not lost during the gap in the nation’s aircraft carrier capability. The US has also underpinned the UK’s programme to acquire and achieve initial operational capability of the ship’s main weapon system – the F-35B Lightning.

Building and preparing the aircraft carriers and aircraft for service is just one side of the coin; the other has been the incredible effort to revamp Her Majesty’s Naval Base (HMNB) Portsmouth so that she can play host to the two largest vessels ever built for the RN. It should not be forgotten that this enormous task was not without risk. The process of widening the entrance channel and deepening the basin so that the Queen Elizabeth-Class (QEC) warships could access the port involved locating, removing and making safe numerous potentially deadly explosives dropped on the harbour during the Second World War. However, now that HMS Prince of Wales has relocated from her birthplace in Rosyth to her new home in Portsmouth, the next stage of the CEPP strategy will unfold at an increasing tempo. She will continue with the trials process her sister ship has pioneered as she gets ready to achieve full operational capability. Once in service, she will embody the ‘Joint’ concept of operations, working seamlessly with Royal Air Force (RAF) and British Army elements. Aircraft from the three UK Armed Services will fly off her, including RAF Chinooks and British Army Apaches. She will also highlight the power of combined operations as US F-35Bs will be welcomed onboard during her first and future operational deployments and taskings. This collaborative ethos will not only represent one of the single most powerful expressions of British intent, it will also offer the UK Government a significant range of options to apply to military campaigns and humanitarian relief efforts – projecting power, stability and security – for at least another five decades.

Simon Michell Editor

THE SHIP’S CREST

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HMS Prince of Wales

CONTENTS 6 The Ship’s Crest

34 All Hands on Deck!

By Giles Ebbutt

10 Inside the QEC Aircraft Carriers 38 S ibling Rivalry 12 Success at Sea

By Alan Dron

By Simon Michell

42 HMS Prince of Wales Affiliates 16 The Making of a Legend

By Simon Michell

By Simon Michell

44 Back in the Game 20 A rmed and Dangerous

By Norman Friedman

By Simon Michell

52 Interoperability with the US 24 B rains Trust

By Alan Dron

By Dr Lee Willett

56 Preparing the Homeport 28 S ensing Danger

By Simon Michell

By Alan Dron

60 Defence in Depth 33 F acts and Figures

By Simon Michell

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HMS PRINCE OF WALES

Commemorating the Homecoming of HMS Prince of Wales Published by Faircount Media Group 4915 W. Cypress St. Tampa, FL 33607 Tel: 813.639.1900 www.defensemedianetwork.com www.faircount.com

CONTENTS 64 S upporters Club

By Simon Michell

68 L ightning Strikes

By Lindsay Peacock

72 T he Return of 809 Squadron ‘The Immortals’

By Jim Winchester

76 ‘ Dambusters’ 617 Squadron

By Chris Aaron

80 Rotary Utility

By Richard Scott

84 Portsmouth’s Place in History

By Simon Michell

88 Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

EDITORIAL Royal Navy Liason Officer: Lt Cdr Lindsey Waudby Editor in Chief: Chuck Oldham Consulting Editor: Simon Michell Managing Editor: Ana E. Lopez Editor: Rhonda Carpenter Contributing Writers: Chris Aaron Mark Daly, Alan Dron, Cdr Sue Eagles Lt Col Giles Ebbutt RM (Retd) Norman Friedman, Ian Goold Nick Hewitt, Simon Michell Charles Oldham, Lindsay Peacock Richard Scott, Dr Lee Willett, Jim Winchester DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Art Director/Project Designer: Robin K. McDowall ADVERTISING Ad Sales Manager: Andrew Moss Account Executive: Geoffrey Weiss OPERATIONS AND ADMINISTRATION Chief Operating Officer: Lawrence Roberts VP, Business Development: Robin Jobson Business Development: Damion Harte Intern: Emily Falcone FAIRCOUNT MEDIA GROUP Publisher, North America: Ross Jobson

By Ian Goold

92 S even Sisters: HMS Prince of Wales Through the Ages

By Charles Oldham

96 T he National Museum of the Royal Navy Salutes the Aircraft Carrier

By Nick Hewitt

100 Fly Navy

By Commander Sue Eagles

106 From Taranto to the Falkland Islands

By Mark Daly

©Copyright Faircount LLC. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Certain images and text were used with permission of the Ministry of Defence and Royal Navy, and in no way are used to imply an endorsement by the Royal Navy or any Ministry of Defence entity for any claims or representations therein. The reproduction of advertisements in this publication does not in any way imply endorsement by the Royal Navy. Faricount LLC does not assume responsibility for the advertisements, nor any representation made therein, nor the quality or deliverability of the products themselves.

inside

THE QEC AIRCRAFT CARRIERS

HMS Prince of Wales

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SUCCESS AT SEA The first man to have commanded both Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, Captain Darren Houston, reveals to Simon Michell the preparations required to get HMS Prince of Wales from her birthplace at Rosyth to her home port at HMNB Portsmouth.

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aving spent three years as the commander (second-in-command) and then, briefly, captain of HMS Queen Elizabeth, there was perhaps no-one better qualified than Capt Darren Houston to coax HMS Prince of Wales through the tricky phases of leaving Rosyth dockyard, completing her Contractor Sea Trials and then making her grand entrance into her home port – Her Majesty’s Naval Base Portsmouth.

The process began in earnest in December 2016, when the first group of 40 experienced sailors joined the ship’s company. According to Capt Houston, ’They were the first to get the ball rolling in terms of forming the vital relationships with our industrial partners needed to finish the build and complete the Contractor Sea Trials’.

Among this initial group were the engineers who would play such a critical part in the process.

From then on, there followed a steady flow of sailors joining the ship’s company – some experienced sailors, others straight out of training – until the number had reached 630. Luckily, the initial 630 included other former members of HMS Queen Elizabeth’s crew beyond the captain, a fact that he greatly welcomed. ’In the beginning, we really relied on the people who had served on our sister ship. Their experience helped us a lot’, he says.

As the crew continued to form up, the transferral of ownership from the Aircraft Carrier Alliance (ACA), who built the ship, to the Royal Navy (RN), who now operates it, became possible.

Having learnt from the way HMS Queen Elizabeth was handed over, a slightly different methodology was employed. Instead of waiting for the ship to be almost completed before she was handed over, she was transferred incrementally, department by

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HMS Prince of Wales

department, as systems came online. ’Also, the big-ticket items, like the vast machinery spaces such as propulsion systems, and the large volume areas were transferred at the beginning, leaving the easier elements and smaller volume compartments to the end’, Houston explains.

In the early days, the crew worked on the ship during the day whilst living in shoreside accommodation at night, but on Aug. 27, 2019, Houston gave the go-ahead for everyone to sleep onboard the ship. This was a hugely significant event. Now that the cabins were ready to move into, and the galleys (kitchens) were able to feed the crew three times a day, the ship began to feel like home. ‘It meant that the crew could really get to grips with learning their way through the labyrinthine passageways that lead to the ship’s 3,000-plus compartments’. Also, by this time the computer system was up and running, which meant that it was possible to send emails and undertake day-to-day business continuity from the ship. The next big date in the calendar after the ‘Ship’s Staff Live on Board’ permission was the ‘Ready for Sea’ date.

Preparing to leave Rosyth Not surprisingly, the bridge teams and watchkeepers did a lot of preparatory work to get HMS Prince of Wales out of the Rosyth dockyard’s inner non-tidal basin. ‘We worked very closely with Forth Ports, the pilots, and the tug crews to practise getting out of the dockyard. We rehearsed it a number of times to get it right’, says Houston. This is not something that can be done on a whim. According to Houston, ‘To get out, you have to have a tidal window. The tidal

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT ALEX CEOLIN, CROWN COPYRIGHT 2019 CROWN COPYRIGHT PHOTO

height has to be absolutely spot on before you can open the basin. Plus, the wind has to be within a range of 12 to 15 knots to make it possible to achieve the tricky manoeuvre of getting out of the basin and anchoring up in the Forth just adjacent to the dockyard’. These sailing conditions only occur every two to three weeks. There is also the passage into HMNB Portsmouth, for which the teams used the simulator at HMS Collingwood to perfect this tricky manoeuvre. Just as they did in Rosyth, they also practised with the pilots and tug teams in Portsmouth.

Top: HMS Prince of Wales undertook extensive sea trials in the North Sea to make sure that everything was working properly before making her maiden entrance into Portsmouth. Above: Capt Darren Houston will be at the helm when HMS Prince of Wales enters her home port of Portsmouth.

Contractor Sea Trials Having made it out of Rosyth safely, HMS Prince of Wales then headed off into the Forth and Murray Firth before venturing further afield around the top of Scotland, using Invergordon as her

HMS Prince of Wales

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ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT ALEX CEOLIN, CROWN COPYRIGHT 2019

logistics base. And, once out into the open sea, the process to prove that the ship was working properly and safe to sail in began. These trials are not so much designed to test the crew, rather it is the ship that is under the microscope. Houston explains, ‘The main purpose of the trials is to test the platform operation and the whole spectrum of capability. We test to make sure the ship can operate correctly with systems and propulsion doing what they are supposed to. The whole process can take about eight to nine weeks’.

The trials were also the first time that aircraft began to operate from the deck. The first aircraft type to operate from HMS Prince of Wales were the Merlin Mk 2 helicopters from 820 Naval Air Squadron (NAS). They brought personnel, spares and stores aboard. They also made sure that the deck was qualified to take aircraft and helped to test many of the other aviation facilities, including the hangars and lifts. Once this has all been achieved, the other helicopter types – Apache,

The crew worked tirelessly with industry contractors to get HMS Prince of Wales ready to set to sea in 2019.

Chinook and Wildcat – can start operating from the deck as well, although that process is not due to start until the early part of 2020. There is a much longer wait until the F-35B can make its first landing on the ship, ‘As for F-35B we will have to wait until the start of 2021 before we get our first Lightning on board’, reveals Houston.

As the big day approaches when HMS Prince of Wales moors up on one of two specially constructed jetties in HMNB Portsmouth, the significance is not lost on Houston, ’Now all of a sudden the United Kingdom has two aircraft carriers at its disposal, which gives the British government strategic choice and the ability to deploy a carrier at a time and to a place of its choosing’.

HMS Prince of Wales

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THE MAKING OF A LEGEND At over £6 billion, the programme to build HM Ships Prince of Wales and Queen Elizabeth is one of Europe’s largest defence projects involving almost every region of the United Kingdom. Simon Michell explains who is responsible for delivering the Royal Navy’s largest ever ships.

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esigning and building aircraft carriers is one of the most complex processes any navy will ever undertake. The sums of money involved are considerable and the political intricacies that have to be navigated can be correspondingly complex and time-consuming. It is consequently not unusual for the period between a government calling for an aircraft carrier replacement and the vessel actually entering service to span well over 20 years. And, with a planned service lifetime of almost half a century, decisions made at the beginning of the process have to account for the vagaries of a changing geopolitical, technological and industrial climate. Building an aircraft carrier is one thing, keeping it maintained and seaworthy for 50 years is yet another.

Not many countries are in a position to build their own aircraft carrier. An industrial endeavour on this scale requires highly advanced technical expertise allied to the appropriate dockyard infrastructure. A huge number of associated skills and qualified engineers and technicians has to be brought into play via a complex and often confusing supply chain matrix. It is no surprise then that there are over 10,000 personnel engaged in the Queen Elizabeth-class programme, with some 2,500 engineering jobs directly created in order to be able to fulfil the contract. This industrial footprint covers the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, with almost every region participating in the manufacture of the vessels. Not only is it creating jobs, it is also helping to train the next

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HMS Prince of Wales

generation of engineers, as some 800 apprentices have been put to work on the project.

The hull and superstructure Having selected BAE Systems as prime contractor together with Thales UK as the main supplier back in 2003, the programme began to take shape in earnest. Since then, a partnership to deliver the carriers has evolved in the form of the BAE Systems-led Aircraft Carrier Alliance (ACA), the other members of which are Babcock, the Ministry of Defence and Thales UK. In their own words, ‘The ACA is an innovative alliance between industry and the Ministry of Defence that was founded to transform the way in which large scale projects such as the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carriers are produced and ultimately delivered’.

Right from the beginning, the ACA underlined the need for a partnership approach declaring, ‘The QE Class is one of the largest engineering projects currently being undertaken in the UK and as such it was going to take more than one organisation to deliver it’. Building aircraft carriers is all about partnerships – domestic and international.

Each member of the ACA has had a specific role to play. The MoD wears two hats, as both an Alliance member and the customer who signs off all the cheques. As well as helping to build the ships at its dockyards, BAE Systems is also responsible for delivering the mission systems for both carriers. Thales UK was instrumental in the design of the ships, supplies electronic systems and

AIRCRAFT CARRIER ALLIANCE – JOHN LINTON

The aft island is lifted into position on the deck of HMS Prince of Wales.

software, and leads the Power & Propulsion Sub Alliance. Babcock, a supplier of engineering and support services built parts of the ships – including the bow section and some of the sponsons (structures that jut out from the side of the hull). The company also assembled HMS Queen Elizabeth at its Rosyth dockyard where it is currently in the final stages of completing her sister carrier – HMS Prince of Wales.

The immense size of the ships dictated that they were constructed in modular sections at a number of different dockyards prior to final assembly at Babcock’s Rosyth facility on the Firth of Forth in Scotland. In all, six dockyards built the modules – Appledore (Babcock in Devon), Birkenhead (Cammel Laird in Merseyside), Glasgow (BAE Systems at Govan and Scotstoun) Hebburn (A&P in Tyneside), Portsmouth (BAE

HMS Prince of Wales

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Left: HMS Prince of Wales’ control centre starts to take shape. Below: HRH Prince of Wales made an early visit in 2016 to the Rosyth dockyard to see how the build programme was getting on.

Systems in Hampshire) and Rosyth (Babcock in Fife).

AIRCRAFT CARRIER ALLIANCE PHOTOS

Power and propulsion Another partnership was formed to deliver propulsion to move the ship forward, and supply power for the on-board electrical systems whilst the ships are at sea and at home in Portsmouth. Thales UK leads the Power and Propulsion Sub Alliance, whose members include GE, L3Harris Technologies and RollsRoyce. Locomotion and power supply are generated via two Rolls-Royce MT30 engines built in Bristol. These are derived from the highly popular Trent 800 aircraft power plant, as seen on the Boeing 777. The low voltage electrical power distribution system that supplies power at various different voltages to the on-board systems was designed and manufactured at Rolls-Royce’s Portsmouth facility. The UK-sourced engines are supplemented by four Wärtsilä power packs from Finland.

Among other things, GE supplied the shore-based rotary frequency

converter that enables the National Grid to supply 60Hz power to the ships at berth, thus reducing noise, pollution and costs.

GE also designed, built and installed the vital Electrical Power Control and Management System on board HM Ships Prince of Wales and Queen Elizabeth. For its part, L3 supplied the Integrated Platform Management System from its MAPPS facilities in Bristol, Burgess Hill and Barrow-in-Furness. This system is key for keeping the crew numbers down, as it helps watchkeeping and damage control teams to operate more efficiently.

It goes without saying that the most critical component for building the two carriers is steel – 40,000 tonnes each. Tata produced the metal from UK mills to supply 94 percent of the required amounts. However, this is no ordinary alloy. Tata metallurgists developed three new grades of extra strong lightweight steel (FH35, EH46 and Install® Plus), resulting in a warship that is more agile in the water and cheaper to run.

From the beginning of the century right up to 2019, the process of building the two carriers has touched almost every region in Britain. Over 200 direct suppliers have been involved from England, Scotland, and Wales. Many more companies have been subcontracted to supply products and services.

Firms as far apart as William Johnston & Co in Inverness to Pipex Ltd in Plymouth have all contributed to this mammoth effort. Along the way innovations and new inventions have emerged that will enhance future build programmes.

That said, the building of the ships is just one element of the project. The upgrade of Portsmouth harbour has involved another set of specialist firms and technicians. UK contractors are also heavily involved in the manufacture of the F-35B that the ships are being built to host.

HMS Prince of Wales

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Simon Michell asks the commander weapon engineering on HMS Prince of Wales, Commander Keith Taylor, to highlight what he and the crew have at their disposal to both defend the ship from attack and mount offensive operations against any potential adversary.

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MS Prince of Wales and her sister ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, will both be equipped with an impressive array of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft capable of delivering an awesome range of weapon systems designed to destroy targets ashore, surface vessels at sea, submarines below the waves, and aircraft in the air.

An F-35B with Paveway laser-guided bombs takes off from the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth for the first time during testing in 2018.

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HMS Prince of Wales

The F-35B Lightning fast jet is without doubt the ship’s primary offensive platform.

It has been developed as a multirole strike fighter, equally adept at attacking targets ashore as well as aircraft in the air. In terms of helicopters, the Merlin Mk. 2 is the main defensive rotary craft. The anti-submarine warfare (ASW) version of the Merlin Mk. 2 carries torpedoes and depth charges to sink enemy submarines and is also equipped with machine guns to deter/destroy the type of small craft that have been used on numerous occasions by terrorists to attack warships. Beyond these two aircraft, the ship can also host the Wildcat and Apache strike helicopters – the former as a surface vessel attack

ROYAL NAYY PHOTO BY LPHOT KYLE HELLER, CROWN COPYRIGHT

ARMED AND DANGEROUS

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT PEPE HOGAN CROWN COPYRIGHT

A Merlin of 820 Naval Air Squadron makes the first deck landing aboard HMS Prince of Wales. The Merlin Mk. 2 operates in both ASW and CROWSNEST early warning/command and control variants.

helicopter and the latter to engage the enemy on land.

Significantly, the two QEC ships are the only carriers so far that have been designed specifically to operate the fifth-generation F-35B stealth multirole aircraft.

Being ‘low-observable’, the F-35B Lightning is capable of penetrating even the most advanced air defence networks to deliver precision weapons against targets specifically selected to degrade an adversary’s defensive capability.

When not tasked with striking targets ashore, F-35B Lightning is also crucial in protecting HMS Prince of Wales and her Strike Group from airborne attack. ‘To put this in greater context, humanitarian assistance operations are often conducted in regions where tensions are high.

The presence of aircraft as potent as the F-35B Lightning provides a significant deterrent to anyone who may wish to undermine those relief efforts for whatever reason’, Taylor points out.

On each deployment, the F-35B Lightning will have access to a range of weapons tailored to the task at hand. For strike missions, F-35B will carry Paveway IV 500-pound GPS/laser-guided smart bombs. According to Taylor, Paveway IV is, ‘a highly capable and precise

weapon which can be deployed in a number of cockpit-programmable modes, allowing the pilot to select the angle and direction of attack, and the detonation mode best suited to the target in order to minimise collateral damage’. For air-to-air engagements, the aircraft will carry a combination of missiles, including the AIM-132 ASRAAM (advanced short-range air-to-air missile) and AIM-120 AMRAAM (advanced medium-range air-to-air missile). This potency is due to be enhanced, in the future, as F-35B will also be capable of carrying the ground-breaking MBDA Meteor beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile (BVRAAM), capable of engaging targets more than 60 miles away with a cruise speed of four times the speed of sound.

Helicopter combat roles For anti-submarine warfare, the Merlin Mk. 2 MPH (Maritime Patrol Helicopter) can carry ‘Stingray’ torpedoes on external hard points. This air-launched sonar-guided torpedo enters the water on a parachute to arrest its descent before switching to search mode to acquire its target. If the water is too shallow for these torpedoes to track down their targets with their sensors, Merlin operators can drop Mk. 11 depth charges. These are free-fall explosives released from the aircraft onto a submarine’s position and set to detonate on reaching a pre-determined depth. Although generally operated from escorts rather than HMS Prince of Wales, the Wildcat HMA (Helicopter Maritime Attack)

HMS Prince of Wales

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British Army Apache attack helicopters will deliver land attack and troop support missions.

missions and close air support of troops ashore.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LH KYLE HELLER, CROWN COPYRIGHT

Close-in defence can also carry these depth charges and will, in the near future, also carry the Sea Venom infrared (IR)-guided anti-ship missile as well as the Martlet lightweight multi-role missile – a laser beam-rider with terminal guidance.

HMS Prince of Wales will routinely embark two variants of the Royal Navy’s Merlin Mk. 2 MPH. The ASW variant will employ acoustic sensors to detect submarines approaching the Task Group, whereas the ‘CROWSNEST’ variant, fitted with an advanced air-surveillance radar, will provide coordination and control to F-35B Lightning jets as well as early warning of hostile aircraft in the vicinity and approaching missiles. Both variants are able to employ their radars to conduct surface surveillance to ensure that all shipping near the carrier is identified, and that suspect contacts are not allowed to get close enough to pose a threat. In support of this mission, Wildcat HMA helicopters, normally embarked in other vessels within the Strike Group, will be at readiness with their machine guns and anti-surface missiles to deter would-be aggressors.

As a scalable platform, HMS Prince of Wales may also deploy with additional helicopters, including Royal Navy Merlin Mk. 4 ‘Junglies’ tasked with delivering Royal Marines ashore and supporting combat operations, RAF Chinooks for transport roles, and, as already mentioned, British Army Apache attack helicopters to conduct strike

After HMS Prince of Wales has commissioned into service, her self-defence capabilities will be enhanced by a combination of 7.62mm miniguns and/or .50-caliber heavy machine guns (HMG). She is also scheduled to receive four 30mm automatic small calibre guns (ASCG). These laser/ electro-optically guided cannons will provide all-round defence against larger watercraft at a greater range than the GPMG/HMG combination. Finally, HMS Prince of Wales is scheduled to receive three 20mm Phalanx close in weapon systems (CIWS). Phalanx can be both radar-directed, for all-round defence against threatening aircraft and missiles, and electro-optically guided for an additional capability against watercraft.

In open water, the carriers’ primary defence, against all threats, will be a combination of their embarked aircraft, and the escorting frigates and destroyers in the strike group.

HMS Prince of Wales

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BRAINS TRUST

THE INTEGRATED MISSION SYSTEM EXPLAINED HMS Prince of Wales’ innovative Integrated Mission System delivers information, communications and real-time operational management tasks to enable the ship to navigate, operate and fight. Former Editor of Jane’s Navy International Dr Lee Willett explains.

O

ne of the primary challenges for HMS Prince of Wales and her crew is to manage the information flowing into, around, and from the ship, and to integrate it with its aircraft, platforms in the UK Carrier Strike Group (UKCSG) and other joint and combined force elements. With a ship’s company of around 800 and overall manning of up to 1,600 (when including air group and other embarked personnel) spread throughout a large ship, the difficulties in managing this flow are even more acute.

With an emphasis on rapid decision-making within a crew that is optimised to deliver the carrier’s mission, there is a high reliance on the effective use and sharing of information via a robust, straightforward and effective networked information infrastructure. At the core of this complicated capability lies the Integrated Mission System (IMS).

The three pillars of IMS The mission system is best described as being the integration of three capabilities. The first area is known as the ‘real-time systems area’. This covers: command management; management of sensors; and meteorological and navigational systems. Together, the capabilities within this area resemble the combat system on other ships.

However, as the carrier’s job is to manage and deploy aircraft rather than deliver specific offensive

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HMS Prince of Wales

capability (the aircraft, rather than the carrier, deliver this), the system is not referred to as a combat system.

The ‘real-time systems area’ has at its core the combat management system, and includes meteorological and navigational systems, radar systems including for detection and air traffic control, the Identification Friend or Foe and direction-finding systems, the TACAN tactical navigation system that enables aircraft to locate the carrier, visual surveillance systems within the ship and on the flight deck, and small weapons.

Second, the mission system incorporates the ship’s communication systems, including every form of communication on and offboard. Internal communications cover everything from desk phones to intercoms to wireless communications.

External communications cover systems and assets sending information off the ship; this embraces data, video and voice – everything from HF upwards to satellite frequencies. Equipment here includes broadcast and alarm systems, tactical communications, and other systems required to connect the command team, as well as the wireless communications that allow freedom of movement for the crew on board.

The third element is the ship’s information systems. As well as individual systems, this third element includes the networked infrastructure that integrates all the sensors, communications

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT JAY ALLEN, CROWN COPYRIGHT

Crew at their consoles aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth. The IMS aboard the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers integrates the communications network that enables the crew to talk to each other.

and other elements, and also brings together the mission planning and data exploitation applications that enable the carrier to conduct its missions.

The information systems are connected by a fibre-optic network based upon commercial technologies. This network includes the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII), which enables the crew to interact on anything from personnel and medical records through to logistics and stores. There is also an air group management application (AGMA), which manages aircraft movement within and between the hangar and flight deck spaces and integrates data such

as aircraft serviceability, pilot availability, and weapons status. The information systems also include planning tools, decision aids, imagery exploitation systems and specialist applications that enable the embarked aircraft to conduct their missions.

Supporting decision-making In terms of meeting these missions, the IMS is ultimately there to allow the crew to achieve a mission purpose with an optimum number of people, and brings together the information to achieve the desired need. This covers receiving and disseminating the mission requirement, which arrives in the form of the air tasking order (ATO) through to the application of the required aircraft, weapons and systems. It also covers the launch and recovery of aircraft as well as the capture,

HMS Prince of Wales

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ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT ALEX CEOLIN, CROWN COPYRIGHT ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT JAY ALLEN, CROWN COPYRIGHT

Above: Whilst at sea the IMS helps the crew of the UK’s new aircraft carriers to successfully plan and execute a carrier strike mission. Right: Aircraft are directed onto their targets and brought safely home with help from the IMS.

dissemination and analysis of data retrieved from those aircraft. It then helps with the decision-making based on that retrieved data. Finally, all this must happen alongside the safe navigation of the ship. All of those threads are supported by mission system capabilities.

By way of example, the ATO is received through the communications system and is presented via the information system to the planners. The planners then use IMS decision tools to understand what is required to achieve the ATO. These tools (including AGMA) enable the planners to work out how many aircraft will be required, the timing and scheduling of sorties, and whether the required weapons are available. They also assist with pilot and other manning preparation, and aircraft serviceability, as well as hangar and flight deck aircraft movements. The process also involves navigating the ship into the right area to deliver the sorties. Once in the air, the aircraft are picked up by the tactical team, tracked by radar, and told where to go to conduct their mission. Throughout

the mission there is continual communication with the aircraft, before they are shepherded back to the carrier’s airspace and recovered on board.

With the size of the ship, the optimised crew, and the need to move information rapidly to support timely decision-making, the IMS is designed so that the right people receive the right information at the right time to enable them to effectively support the mission at the appropriate level. The mission requirement and the way in which the mission system supports this require a shift in thinking, however. This ability to pass the information quickly around to all the departments via the network distribution in a form that conveys the information that they need to know to the departments that then consume and use that information has introduced a lot of change in conceptual thinking. As opposed to using voice, pipes and paper trails (as has been the norm on ships previously), managing your life via an electronic means and doing what it says and contributing to a plan as it is formed does require a slightly different mindset.

This new approach, however, coupled with the high reliance on information-sharing to enable rapid decision-making, is facilitated by the IMS’s tools and processes to enable the carrier to achieve its mission, with the minimum number of interactions from the crew.

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SENSING DANGER HMS Prince of Wales is equipped with two of the world’s most sophisticated radar systems. Alan Dron explains why.

I

n war, the side that sees the other side first has traditionally had the advantage. With that in mind, HMS Prince of Wales will have radars that can detect aircraft 400km away – in other words, the distance from Portsmouth to Kendal, in the Lake District. And, even what is officially classed as the vessel’s ‘medium-range’ surveillance radar will be able to detect aircraft out to 200km.

The radar that will give the crew that 400km vision is the S1850M, provided by BAE Systems Integrated Systems Technologies. The S1850M is based on Thales’s SMART-L radar, which already has a pedigree of being installed on some of the world’s most advanced air defence warships. It provides the main search sensor for the Royal Navy’s Type 45 destroyers, as well as the Horizonclass vessels of the French and Italian navies.

The S1850M – the large black rectangle that rotates on top of HMS Prince of Wales’ forward superstructure island – is the visible face of one of the world’s most sophisticated air defence systems.

It can handle up to 1,000 tracks simultaneously and its operators can guide the ship’s own F-35B fighters on to any hostile or unidentified aircraft. It has the capability to detect stealth targets, such as incoming missiles, at 65km, even when they are approaching against a background of surface clutter. It can also be used to provide air traffic control services for civilian aircraft, a potentially vital role if the ships are stationed offshore from a country whose airport infrastructure has been severely damaged by a natural disaster such as an earthquake.

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HMS Prince of Wales

As well as its primary air defence function, the S1850M can also act in a surface surveillance role out to the radar horizon. There are few major differences between the SMART-L and the S1850M; the equipment on HMS Prince of Wales rotates slightly faster than that on the SMART-L. In the heart of the system, the algorithms of the S1850M differ from those of the SMART-L, but the manufacturers understandably decline to provide details.

Further improvements to the S1850M’s capabilities may be on the horizon. Currently being considered by the Ministry of Defence is a study that would look at the radar’s abilities to track incoming ballistic missiles and vector interceptor missiles on to them, but if that goes ahead, it would be more likely to be applied to the radars on the Type 45 air-defence destroyers rather than the aircraft carriers.

Thales are happy to confirm that, since entering service, feedback on the performance of the S1850M has been positive, with users particularly commenting on its very high reliability rate, which eases the burden on maintenance crews. To further ease the radar’s maintenance requirements, some of its components are COTS, or ‘commercial off the shelf’ parts that can be easily swapped

out, while others will periodically be subject to a technical ‘refresh’ throughout the life of the radar.

The S1850M is designed to have preventative maintenance after five years in service, with some major maintenance at around the 10-year stage in its life.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT ALEX CEOLIN, CROWN COPYRIGHT

The Artisan 3D The most complex aspect of creating a modern warship is integrating all the vessel’s systems, particularly those used for combat. An indication of this comes in the effort to install the new aircraft carriers’ ARTISAN 3D radar. Preparations to install the radar on the first carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, took two-and-a-half years. Part of this time was spent in creating a life-size mock-up of the carrier’s aft island at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. This was used to hone the radar’s interaction with the on-board combat systems to ensure that, when it was installed ‘for real’, it would slot smoothly into the network of other systems on the vessel.

ARTISAN, which stands for Advanced Radar Target Indication Situational Awareness and

HMS Prince of Wales hosts the SM1850M on the front island and the ARTISAN 3D on the aft island, giving her 360-degree visibility out to 400km.

Navigation, is classed as a medium-range 3D surveillance radar. It replaces the earlier Type 996 surveillance and target indication radar and is formally known as the Type 997. It is installed atop the aft superstructure block and is designed to detect other vessels and aircraft, as well as allowing the ship’s crew to manage aircraft traffic.

Much smaller than the S1850M system, ARTISAN 3D nevertheless weighs in at 700kg. It can monitor 800 objects simultaneously from as close as 200 metres out to 200km and is able to operate in a dense electronic environment – it has been tested to successfully pierce the interference

HMS Prince of Wales

29

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created by 10,000 mobile phone signals. This ability to cut through electronic interference is vital, as jamming is expected to be one of the biggest problems faced by armed forces in a future conflict.

The radar has already been retrofitted to 11 of the Royal Navy’s Type 23 frigates during major refits, as well as to amphibious assault ships Albion and Bulwark. In November 2016, it successfully completed three years of sea trials on the frigates, which has allowed the Royal Navy to gain experience of using it and to work through any teething problems. Compared to the earlier Type 996 radar, ARTISAN 3D is designed to provide the Queen Elizabeth class and its crews with improved situational awareness, rapid classification of threats, small-boat detection, resistance to jamming, and the ability to operate in the electronic ‘clutter’ found in coastal areas.

ARTISAN 3D has been designed to operate with the latest surface-to-air missile systems, such as the Common Anti-Air Modular Missile (CAMM), specifically the Sea Ceptor weapon system, which will start to appear on Royal Navy warships in the next few years. Like the S1850M, ARTISAN 3D can be used to conduct

Top: The SM1850M (foreground) can spot an incoming enemy aircraft while it is still 400km away. Above: Already proven on board the Royal Navy’s Type 23 frigates, the ARTISAN 3D medium-range radar provides air traffic management capability to the ship.

air traffic control services for both military and civilian aircraft. It is already qualified to carry out air traffic control duties on the navy’s Type 23 frigates.

HMS Prince of Wales

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Fast Facts HMS Prince of Wales HMS Prince of Wales and her sister ship HMS Queen Elizabeth are the two largest ships in the Royal Navy with a displacement of 65,000 tonnes each.

With a width of 70 metres, more than three football pitches fit on the deck.

The QEC ships are both longer than the Houses of Parliament, with a length of 280 metres.

At 56 metres high, HMS Prince of Wales is four metres taller than Niagara Falls – 50.9m high.

When embarked with sailors, air crew, and marines, the ships can comfortably accommodate 1600 men and women.

Power and Propulsion: Each ship’s two Rolls-Royce MT30 gas turbines and four Wärtsilä diesel generators produce enough energy to power 300,000 kettles or a town the size of Swindon.

The on-board water treatment plant produces over 500 tonnes of fresh water daily.

AIRCRAFT: A squadron of F-35B Lightning aircraft will be routinely embarked for operations, with the capacity to deploy a Tailored Air Group of up to 40 aircraft. That could include F-35B Lightning, Merlin CROWSNEST (AsaC), Merlin Mk. 2 (ASW), Merlin Mk. 4 (troop lift), Wildcat, Apache and Chinook. The ships have also proven ability to operate the MH-53E Sea Dragon and MV-22 Osprey from the deck.

The three engine exhausts are as much as 2.6 metres in diameter and are located at the top of the Forward Island to expel exhaust from the diesel generators and gas turbines at the carrier’s highest point.

Each ship has a max speed of 25kts and a range of 10,000nm.

The ship’s two propellers weigh 33 tonnes each – heavier than two double decker buses – and produce 80MW of power – enough to run 1,000 cars.

A complement of 800 sailors is required to sail the ships, and there is room for 250 Royal Marines and their equipment.

Each of the two huge aircraft lifts can move a brace of F-35Bs from the hangar to the flight deck in 60 seconds (2 per lift). They’re so powerful that together they could lift the entire ship’s crew.

At 3.1m high, each anchor weighs 13 tonnes – almost as much as a double decker bus.

There are more than 250,000km of electric cables and 8,000km of fibre-optic cables woven into each ship.

FORWARD ISLAND: The navigation bridge is located on Four Deck. It has deck to deckhead windows, which are up to 2 metres tall, ensuring a level of visibility far beyond previous aircraft carriers. The 37 8-tonne windows are 40mm thick, enabling them to withstand a massive impact.

The observation bridge is located one deck below.

The aircraft Visual Landing Aid has been placed toward the rear of the Forward Island to help pilots pinpoint the runway.

Sources: Aircraft Carrier Alliance and the Royal Navy

WEAPONS: Designed for the latest version of the Phalanx close-in weapon system for self-defence against airborne targets as well as 30mm and 7.62mm machine guns to counter asymmetric threats on the surface and at low levels.

RADARS: The long-range radar is installed at the very top of the Forward Island. It is the size of a large mobile home and able to track 1,000 moving targets 400km away. Alongside this sits the satellite communications antenna.

The navigation radars are one deck lower, directly above the navigation bridge.

The foghorn is on Six Deck, and at 146 decibels is louder than a rock concert and can be heard two miles away. If HMS Prince of Wales sounds her horn on entering Portsmouth, she could be heard by the Pompey supporters at Fratton Park.

Giles Ebbutt asks Captain Matt Harvey, who commands Flag Officer Sea Training (South), what it takes to get an aircraft carrier ready for combat.

H

MS Prince of Wales has an impressive array of capabilities on paper, but without a ship’s company that is trained and confident in their own ability to operate the ship under all circumstances, those capabilities will not be realised to their full effect.

Reaching the all-important ‘Trained to Fight’ status requires a partnership between the ship’s company and Flag Officer Sea Training (FOST).

FOST delivers the demanding sea training (ST) that ensures Royal Navy ships are fit to fight. The ST organisation has two elements – FOST (North), based in Faslane, and FOST (South) in Plymouth. The former is responsible for submarine ST and most of the smaller surface ships. The latter is responsible for all the remaining surface fleet, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA), and the hydrographic survey ships. While the organisation used to have a fearsome reputation for inflexibility, Capt Matt Harvey, Captain ST at FOST(S), says that its approach is no longer ‘directive’ but aims to ‘encourage discussion and draw out lessons and not adopt a one-size-fits-all attitude’. But the training remains as demanding as ever.

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HMS Prince of Wales

FOST(S) has a maximum capacity to train six ships at a time, with an occasional surge to seven, but this is driven by the size and type of platform and the specialist staff needed.

A capital ship the size of HMS Prince of Wales will require at least 50 percent of the FOST staff, and more in some areas.

Harvey also notes the need to bring in external expertise from elsewhere in the RN to cover specific aspects of operating an aircraft carrier, such as air engineering and aircraft handling above and below deck, which his staff does not have. The RN last operated a fixed-wing carrier in 2010, so such experience is thin on the ground, but he says that they have been lucky enough to send individuals to serve on US and French carriers to retain the expertise. A team

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT ALEX CEOLIN, CROWN COPYRIGHT

ALL HANDS ON DECK!

Like all Royal Navy ships, HMS Prince of Wales has to undergo the six-week FOST Sea Training cycle in order to be declared ‘trained to fight’.

Flag Officer Sea Training (FOST) serials took place aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth as part of the ship’s sea trials package. Lessons learned during HMS Queen Elizabeth’s gruelling sea training proved extremely useful to the crew of her younger sister ship.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT DAVE JENKINS, CROWN COPYRIGHT

of FOST engineers and damage control experts has also been onboard HMS Queen Elizabeth since 2014, gaining experience alongside the ship’s company.

Trained to fight By the time HMS Prince of Wales arrives in Plymouth to begin training, her crew and the FOST staff will have worked together on several occasions, as is the case with all new-build ships. These will have included periods in September 2019, firstly conducting safety and readiness checks (SARC)

alongside to help establish watch routines, standard operating procedures (SOP) and emergency drills, and then a similar package known as initial sea safety training (ISST) when the ship first goes to sea. This will be followed in early 2020 with a three-week period of harbour and sea training, which is a standard package for all new-build RN vessels. It will include exercising complex peacetime emergencies such as fire, flood, and medical casualties as well as the safe operation of aircraft, building up to multi-spot helicopter operations by day and night. HMS Prince of Wales will then continue to conduct further trials until her BOST (Basic Operational Sea Training) begins towards the end of 2020.

Much of the six-week BOST syllabus, which has been developed over the 61 years of FOST’s existence, is common to all ships that undertake the training. It covers every aspect of the ship’s capabilities and ensures the ship’s company are used to working with each other in a high pressure, high tempo, and potentially dangerous environment.

Harvey observes that ‘Operational capability is a team sport; it is reliant on the team dynamic, which usually takes six weeks to develop fully’.

The period starts with a harbour week, which aims to ensure that the ship is safe and capable and covers a range of possible events such as loss of power, fire, flood, or terrorist attack, and ensures that the ship’s SOPs are fit for purpose and understood by all. This period also provides a chance for the Operational Sea Training (OST) staff to put the ship’s warfare team through their paces in the shore-based simulator suite.

The following five weeks are spent at sea conducting tactical exercises of increasing complexity, covering all the different areas of warfare while simultaneously coping with various onboard

HMS Prince of Wales

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Like her sister ship, HMS Prince of Wales must be able to operate a variety of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft by day and night in all weather conditions. To achieve this, her BOST will include a large number of progressive flying serials by various helicopter types, and in the latter stages by the F-35B.

emergencies and other procedures. The exercises culminate each week in the demanding ‘Thursday War’ which provides a complex tactical environment as well as continuing emergencies, requiring a sustained effort on the part of the ship’s company. The day after the Thursday War features a different type of exercise, such as disaster relief, an evacuation or a boarding evolution. Weekly reports chart progress and identify strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the six weeks, if successful, a ship is declared ‘trained to fight’.

Harvey observes that because HMS Prince of Wales’ ship’s company is more senior and more experienced than the average destroyer or frigate she will arrive in a more advanced

state of readiness, ’I expect HMS Prince of Wales to start her BOST better than a frigate or a destroyer and to go quicker and further, but the multitude of aviation aspects is the thing that takes the time’. Like her sister ship, HMS Prince of Wales must be able to operate a variety of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft by day and night in all weather conditions. To achieve this, her BOST will include a large number of progressive flying serials by various helicopter types, and in the latter stages by the F-35B. It will involve using the deck to its maximum capacity and practising all possible aviation emergencies.

By the end of 2020, this entire extended period of training, starting from her ISST, will result in the UK’s second aircraft carrier with a fully trained and worked-up ship’s company capable of conducting aviation operations with both fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft in the most demanding tactical conditions.

HMS Prince of Wales

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SIBLING RIVALRY Sir Simon Lister, managing director of the Aircraft Carrier Alliance (ACA) charged with building the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, reflects on the improvements they were able to make having learnt valuable lessons from completing the first-of-class.

Alan Dron reports.

ith HMS Prince of Wales, we’ve learned to do things faster and more cheaply. We’re building on the shoulders of people who have gone before. Some may interpret that as criticism of my predecessors, but we couldn’t have done this without them. I remain in awe of what people did. It’s much, much more straightforward for us to come after and make a good fist of the second article’, explains Sir Simon Lister.

First-of-class ships are almost invariably more expensive than follow-on vessels and the Queen Elizabeth class is no different. ‘We’ve built HMS Prince of Wales for around 20 percent less than her sister ship in cost terms and we are using two-thirds of the time HMS Queen Elizabeth took. Those are the headline savings. They have enabled us to come close to the budget set in the 2013 renegotiation’, Lister says. A direct cost comparison between the two ships is difficult, as the project control structure has changed and adapted to meet the programme’s needs over time. Overall, however, the ACA estimates that HMS Prince of Wales will have a financial turnout of around 19 percent less than HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Design changes There were many changes to the design of the two vessels. That said, the fundamentals of the design remain absolutely the same, but in a ship of this scale there are many lessons learned in the fine grain of the design. For example, when a ship’s company start to occupy and operate a ship, they discover there are better ways of doing things, or better ways of setting out systems. ‘Of course, marginal improvements in design for significant cost would not have been contemplated, but where there was a reasonably priced development that would improve the capability of the ship, that’s been implemented’, reveals Lister.

The most fundamental thing that’s reduced the time and overall cost

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HMS Prince of Wales

has been the critical review of HMS Prince of Wales’ programme and the strategy and logic around which it’s been constructed, based on the experience of HMS Queen Elizabeth.

According to Lister, ‘To build a ship in the right order is to save money, and once you’ve experienced the build of the first, the logical sequencing of the second becomes much easier. Outfitting the ship, and the sequence in which that was done, changed.

ACA prioritised the most challenging areas: the prime propulsion system, the mission

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF AIRCRAFT CARRIER ALLIANCE

‘W

First-of-class ships always cost more money and take more time to build. HMS Queen Elizabeth was no exception. But her sister ship HMS Prince of Wales (right) benefitted from the lessons learned on the first-of-class ship’s construction.

system, and aviation systems. We carefully and logically sequenced this into a programme where we exploited the size of the ship to enable us to open up as many parallel work fronts as soon as we could. We have hastened the programme by the installation, testing and painting of key supporting systems and enabling systems as early as possible’.

These systems included low-voltage/highvoltage electricity and cold-water systems as well as cooling and ventilation throughout the ship.

By prioritising those elements, the downstream fitting and setting to work of equipment was more easily facilitated. Secondly, ACA initiated a highly delegated management structure, with this being overhauled to allow staff to undertake responsibilities and empowering them to deliver their individual sections of the ship, including the control of subcontractors. Finally, ‘There was a really

comprehensive “lessons learned” exercise to scoop up the thousands of proposals for improvement and systematically draw them together and, most importantly, implement them. That sounds basic, but it was that serial implementation of lessons that enabled us to make progress. That was driven largely by the shop floor. It sounds trite to say we created a suggestion scheme, but we’ve listened very hard to the shop floor and put in place those changes they’ve proposed. We’ve created a very high engagement level with the workforce, so they buy into and share the pride in what they’ve been doing. That has been a fundamental building block of what we’ve been doing over the last two years. Our model is not top-down, it’s bottom-up.

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HMS Prince of Wales

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Above: HMS Prince of Wales continues to benefit from lessons being learned by those operating her sister ship.

Right: Learning from the process to get HMS Queen Elizabeth into service has led to adjustments to the sequencing and preparation of individual elements, helping to reduce cost and build time. One example of this is in the application of the flight deck coating, seen here aboard HMS Prince of Wales.

tried to promote is a leadership style that’s about enablement and engagement. It sounds “soft”, but it’s not – it’s hard to make it work’, Lister proudly explains.

Big savings One specific example of an improvement between the first and second vessels was the Thermo Metallic Spray (TMS) application to the flight deck, designed to protect it from the heat of the exhaust of the embarked Lockheed Martin F-35B aircraft. The final costing for this feature on HMS Queen Elizabeth was agreed with the Ministry of Defence at circa £35 million. Not only was the budget for the same treatment reduced to around £15 million for HMS Prince of Wales, but the performance in applying it was better than anticipated, with the team now expecting the

cost to be around £13 million. These costs are not directly comparable, Lister cautions, as HMS Queen Elizabeth’s TMS application would have included system development, but on a like-for-like basis, HMS Prince of Wales’ use of the material will still be less than 50 percent than that on the first-ofclass. Similarly, the integration costs of the mission systems, such as radars and operation rooms on HMS Queen Elizabeth, cost circa £23 million and are expected to out-turn at about £15 million on HMS Prince of Wales.

‘Moreover, setting power and propulsion systems equipment to work in the right sequence allowed considerable savings to be made in the cost of commissioning the plant’, explains Lister. Time is money, and the careful sequencing of the work meant that when external contractors arrived to undertake their part of the commissioning, they found the space in which they had to work ready and waiting for them.

Lessons from HMS Queen Elizabeth’s sea trials were also incorporated into HMS Prince of Wales.

‘We discovered we had to make some changes to the design. This involved the balancing of some air flows to clear smoke from the ship in the event of a fire’, Lister says.

All in all, the sum total of these changes is a significantly faster build that will ultimately allow HMS Prince of Wales to join the fleet earlier than anticipated and for less money than planned.

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Designed by Proctor + Stevenson, this unique symbol of affiliation will be printed on the ship’s Flag Suite crockery.

The liver bird on the left represents Liverpool, with Bristol represented by the unicorn on the right.

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inaugural ‘Affiliates Day’ celebrations. Groom, who eventually handed over command of the ship in September 2018, went on to thank the affiliates for attending, saying, ’These affiliations signify a major milestone in the life of the ship and mark the beginning of what will be long and fruitful relationships for the next 50 years’.

HMS PRINCE OF WALES AFFILIATES The mutual benefits of the Royal Navy’s ship affiliation tradition are many and varied. Simon Michell reveals the network of affiliates that HMS Prince of Wales has already established.

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am delighted to announce that HMS Prince of Wales is now formally affiliated with the cities of Bristol and Liverpool, Greenwich Hospital, the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, the Welsh Guards, the Royal Lancers and 27 Squadron Royal Air Force’. This official announcement of the first seven affiliates was made by the Ship’s Senior Officer, Capt Ian Groom, as the initial group was hosted by the Royal Navy (RN) at Rosyth dockyard in September 2016 on the ship’s

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All major RN ships have affiliations as part of a long tradition that binds their crews to the land via a network of relationships whose tentacles spread across the United Kingdom from shore to shore. The first seven affiliates, selected for the second-in-class aircraft carrier, highlight the range of organisations and establishments that are invited to become part of a ship’s extended family. They can encompass cities, hospital trusts, cadet units, army regiments and air force squadrons, as well as venerable city institutions such as the aforementioned Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths.

This 700-year old institution was, according to its Prime Warden, Mrs Judith Cobham-Lowe, incredibly honoured to be invited to become an affiliate. ’For us, it is a way of showing our support and gives us a connection with the great service which the armed forces provide. It also links us with a much larger world beyond the Square Mile. With over 90 percent of the nation’s trade coming and going by sea, this connection is important’.

Affiliation is clearly not a one-way street, as the prime warden points out: ’The benefits are mutual.

Such an affiliation gives the ship and its crew a link to an ancient guild, steeped in an industry which still thrives today, in one of the great financial capitals in the world. It allows the RN’s purpose to be communicated to a wide-ranging and influential group of our members who come from all walks of life’. And, from the other perspective, the Lord Mayor of Bristol highlights one of the benefits he envisages: ‘By affiliating ourselves with this ship we are also helping to boost Bristol’s image around the world, and confirm our status as a city of international importance’.

PROCTOR + STEVENSON

The Affiliate Tradition

CROWN COPYRIGHT PHOTO

The Welsh Guards were among the first seven affiliates of HMS Prince of Wales.

Since becoming affiliates, the process of establishing the relationships that will thrive over the next half century has begun. The Goldsmiths’ Deputy Clerk Nick Harland revealed that the former Senior Naval Officer and his Liaison Officer had been invited to various functions at Goldsmiths’ Hall and that the guild will be building the relationship through supporting the ship and its crew in a number of ways to assist in meeting those of their needs which cannot be provided from government funding. In a reciprocal gesture, guild members were invited to visit the ship whilst it was being built. Looking to the future, Nick Harland was very keen for the possibility of members sailing with her to experience life at sea.

For their part, the city affiliates, Bristol and Liverpool, are both anticipating huge crowds

when the ship or its company visits them in appreciation of their affiliation. In fact, some of the crew have already visited the two cities. In June 2019, a 12-strong peloton of cyclists from the ship made stopovers in both Liverpool and Bristol during a 500-mile charity ride. With Bristol just 100 miles from their destination, they were invited to refuel at a sumptuous breakfast at City Hall as guests of the Lord Mayor and Lord Lieutenant. In the knowledge that food is never far away from a sailor’s thoughts, Bristol has designed a special crest for the vessel’s tableware to celebrate the union between the ship and the two cities. One of the South West’s longest standing creative agencies, Proctor + Stevenson, was invited by the HMS Prince of Wales City of Bristol Affiliation Board to contribute design services for the ship’s Flag Suite of crockery. Proctors designed a crest, combining elements of both Bristol and Liverpool’s city crests together with that of HMS Prince of Wales.

The current captain of HMS Prince of Wales, Capt Darren Houston, is a very enthusiastic fan of the affiliate concept, saying, ‘We are very lucky; we have got a great bunch of affiliates. We held affiliates days last year and early this year where we invited members of all our affiliates to come up to Rosyth and visit the ship. They have had their appetites whetted, and when we get to Portsmouth we will engage with them again. We will invite members to the commissioning, and of course, next year, we will have a variety of events that they can all get involved in. I can’t say when, but there are plans to take some of our affiliate members to sea’.

FORMAL CIVILIAN AFFILIATIONS • The City of Bristol • The City of Liverpool • Greenwich Hospital Charity • The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths • The Worshipful Company of Farriers • The Honourable Company of Air Pilots • The Worshipful Company of Engineers FORMAL MILITARY AFFILIATIONS • The Welsh Guards • The Royal Lancers (QRLs and 9th/12th) • 27 Sqn Royal Air Force INFORMAL BONDS OF FRIENDSHIP • HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse Survivors Association • Worshipful Company of Distillers • A1 Steam Locomotive Trust • Wales Rugby Football Union • IMarEST (sponsorship agreement, through life) • Greenwich Sea Cadets

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BACK IN THE GAME As HMS Prince of Wales joins her sister ship at Portsmouth, Norman Friedman highlights the unique value carriers offer and why so many major navies have also decided to become members of this exclusive club.

carrier is mobile air power. That air power can protect a fleet or a convoy at sea, and it can be used against an enemy ashore. Nothing other than a carrier offers the same capacity. The British government of the day learned as much during the strikes against Serbia in 1997. Various NATO countries had contributed large numbers of aircraft based ashore in Italy. Britain made a similar contribution, but in addition, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal was operating in the Adriatic. During the strike campaign, bad weather often closed the Italian air bases down. However, Ark Royal was able to seek out areas of acceptable weather. She was also much closer to the targets than the airfields ashore. Even though she carried only a few aircraft, on many days she contributed more attack sorties – more of the point of the NATO air effort – than the entire land-based air force.

This experience had a direct effect on UK government planning. The Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which was being conducted at the same time, recommended that the United Kingdom (UK) build two large carriers, of which HMS Prince of Wales is the second.

During the Libyan Revolution a few years later in 2011, the consequences of not having a carrier on the scene became evident. This time, NATO was supporting Libyan rebels fighting Col Muammar Gaddafi’s forces. Without a carrier, the main British air contribution consisted of UK-based strike aircraft. On paper, this seemed like a reasonable option as they could certainly fly to Libya, attack, and then return.

However, a long flight from the UK would only have been acceptable if the war in Libya had involved attacks on pre-selected targets. The reality of supporting the Libyan rebels was the need for short-notice attacks on targets that suddenly popped up out of nowhere. The only way of being able to engage them would have been by loitering in the skies above, but to do this, they would have needed to be based quite close by. A fast-jet carrier in the Mediterranean would have solved this

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UK F-35 Lightning jets aboard Britain’s next-generation aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, for the first time.

Flown by Royal Navy and Royal Air Force pilots, the Lightning jets embarked aboard the 65,000-tonne carrier to conduct operational trials off the east coast of the USA.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT DANIEL SHEPHERD, CROWN COPYRIGHT

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ITALIAN NAVY PHOTO

Below: The Italian navy aircraft carrier Cavour is designed to combine fixed-wing V/STOL and helicopter air operations, command and control operations and the transport of military or civilian personnel and heavy vehicles.

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U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS JIMMY ONG ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT DAVE JENKINS, CROWN COPYRIGHT

Top: The French navy aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle (R 91) and the Royal Australian Navy submarine HMAS Collins (SSG 73) transit the Bay of Bengal during exercise La Perouse. Above: The Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov.

challenge, as aircraft could have been held on stand-by, plus they would have had the endurance to loiter as needed.

Eventually, UK forces were provided a solution of sorts in the form of Army Air Corps Apache attack helicopters launched from the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean. However, these helicopters would not have been a viable option if the Libyan government forces had been able to get their hands on better anti-aircraft weapon systems.

When the SDR was conducted in 1997, it seemed that international crises might well be unusual and infrequent.

At the time, it was hard to imagine situations in which British troops fighting far from home would need air support.

Since then, the world has become far less stable, and armed intervention far more common. American experience in Middle Eastern wars has been that local governments are relatively reluctant to welcome foreign combat aircraft.

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PLA DAILY PHOTO

The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning (CV 16), once the Russian Kuznetsov-class carrier Varyag, refitted, upgraded, and commissioned into the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

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U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 3RD CLASS STEVEN EDGAR

However, when US carriers have been deployed, so that combat air support has been available whether or not local governments have offered base rights, often those same governments have found it easier to grant such access. The reason is simple: In many cases a local government may see this level of cooperation as very much in its own interest, but the nuances of local politics can sometimes make it difficult to bring about. That said, those against offering access have to expend substantial political capital opposing it. Mustering this opposition becomes less appealing when it is obvious that air strikes can be delivered off nearby carriers. Thus, even when carriers do not provide the bulk of combat aircraft, they are useful both militarily and politically.

Air defence at sea The other side of carrier capability is the air defence of ships at sea. It takes a carrier to keep fighters aloft near a moving force of ships. The

The Spanish navy amphibious assault ship-aircraft carrier Juan Carlos I (L-61) underway in the Baltic Sea during Exercise Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 2019.

great lesson of the Falklands War, which was the last time that a British naval force found itself under air attack, was that missile-armed surface ships could provide an inner layer of defence, but that it took carrier aircraft to extend that defence out to the limit at which enemy aircraft could launch anti-ship missiles. It was fortunate that the Argentine forces had only a very limited stock of Exocet missiles, and therefore to make each missile count, the attacking aircraft had to come within range of RN shipboard defences.

Even then, carrier fighters, in this case operating at the limit of their range, shot down most of the Argentine attackers.

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THE CARRIER CLUB IS IN CONSTANT ACTION

INDIAN NAVY PHOTO

The Indian aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya (R 33), formerly the Russian navy’s Admiral Gorshkov, was heavily modified and improved for Indian Navy service.

In any future opposed operation, the majority, if not all, of the attackers will be armed with stand-off anti-ship missiles.

Shipboard missile defences will be predominantly directed at those incoming weapons, not the aircraft delivering them.

Unless the attacking airplanes are shot down – by carrier fighters – they will simply fly back to base and return to attack again. Such attacks would exhaust the stocks of shipboard missiles. It takes a carrier and carrier-borne fighters to gain freedom of operation by eliminating the enemy’s anti-ship air arm.

Finally, a large carrier can also accommodate, service, and control anti-submarine helicopters to an extent smaller surface warships cannot. In any future opposed operation against an enemy well-equipped with submarines, the carrier’s anti-submarine capacity would be invaluable.

Since the end of World War II there has been an ongoing presence of US carriers abroad. Until recently, these consisted of both Nimitz-class carriers with F/A-18 Hornet strike/fighters and large-deck amphibious ships – the latter operating short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) AV-8B Harrier II jump jets. However, in 2018 the USMC’s Essex Amphibious Ready Group deployed to the Pacific and Middle East with the F-35B Lightning II, marking the aircraft’s first US combat deployment. Not far behind the B variant, the F-35C achieved initial operational capability in February 2019, and its first seaborne operational deployment is due in 2021 onboard the Nimitz-class USS Carl Vinson.

In the Gulf and elsewhere, the Western interests those ships support have been further backed by the Rafale jets from the French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, as well as by Italian and Spanish aircraft carriers that both embark AV-8B Harrier II STOVL aircraft.

Closer to home, the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean in 2016 with its complement of Su-33 and MiG-29 fast jets in support of the Syrian Assad regime. Meanwhile, in 2017, the Chinese Liaoning aircraft carrier, which is a sister ship of the Admiral Kuznetsov, steamed around Taiwan to back up Chinese political claims on the break-away republic. Once fully operational, it will host a complement of the J-15 fighter – a close relative of the Russian Su33. Also in that region, India has deployed one MiG-29K-equipped carrier (a rebuilt Russian ship now known as the INS Vikramaditya). India is building more carriers, as is China. Thailand operates a much smaller carrier equipped with S-70 and MH-60 helicopters.

In the Western Hemisphere, Brazil up until spring 2017, operated the aircraft carrier São Paulo, which is an ex-French vessel built in the late 1950s. Brazil’s fleet flagship was home to the venerable A-4 Skyhawk fast jets. In light of prohibitive costs of refurbishment, the Brazilian government retired the carrier on Nov. 22, 2018, after more than half a century at sea – 18 years of which were with the Brazilian Navy.

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INTEROPERABILITY WITH THE US As HMS Prince of Wales makes her entrance into the historic Portsmouth naval base, HMS Queen Elizabeth continues to work up to full operational capability in order to restore the UK’s ability to operate fast jets at sea. Alan Dron explains why she, followed closely by HMS Prince of Wales, will not only be developing a UK capability, but also vital interoperability with the US Navy and Marine Corps.

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lose co-operation with the US is, of course, hardly a new concept. It dates back to World War II, notably in protecting the North Atlantic convoys. The US, Canadian and UK navies (and air forces) shared the defence of merchantmen as they made the hazardous 3,000-mile trip.

In a relatively recent example of this critical co-operation the Type 42 destroyer HMS Gloucester, acting as ‘goalkeeper’ to the US battleship USS Missouri during the First Gulf War in 1991, brought down an Iraqi Silkworm anti-ship missile with a salvo of Sea Darts as the Chinesebuilt anti-ship missile homed in on the US capital ship – the first successful missile versus missile engagement by any navy in combat. And RN minehunters cleared the way for US units to approach the Kuwaiti coast as the Iraqis retreated.

From the early 1980s, carrier co-operation between the USN and the RN was undertaken by the Invincible-class carriers in NATO and coalition operations. However, the abilities of the Invincible class in being able to operate only helicopters and Harriers was a limiting factor in that co-operation, although US Marine Corps (USMC) Harriers did operate from HMS Illustrious at one point. The ‘true’ carrier capabilities of the Queen Elizabeth Class (QEC) make them much more compatible with the US Navy’s massive Nimitz and Gerald R Ford-class flat-tops. The Invincible-class carriers, of course, were always only a halfway house toward full carrier capability. Following the retirement

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of the RN’s last major carriers Victorious and Ark Royal, and the cancellation of their planned ‘CVA01’ replacement, the political sensitivities over the costs of an aircraft carrier meant that, for several years during their development, the Invincible class were officially referred to as ‘through-deck cruisers’.

Despite the limitations brought about by their relatively small size, in the end, the capabilities of the Invincibles and embarked Harriers were ‘beyond our wildest expectations’, says Commodore Mike Utley, the current commander, UK Carrier Strike Group. However, with the QEC about to come on-stream, ‘What we get now, is a massive step forward to fifth-generation levels of interoperability between us and the US. That is nowhere more evident than by the fact that the US Marine Corps is going to put a squadron of F-35s on board Queen Elizabeth for CSG21 – the 2021 Carrier Strike Group operational deployment’. That year will see the Carrier Strike Group reach full operational capability, after the interim milestone of initial operational capability at the end of 2020. ‘In order to demonstrate the close partnership between the US and UK, it was decided that we would offer them – and they offered us – a squadron of F-35Bs, the same version as we will use, to come on the CSG21 deployment’, explains Cdre Utley. Together, the two squadrons will embark around 24 F-35Bs on HMS Queen Elizabeth, and the USMC is believed to be planning to permanently designate one of its F-35B squadrons to provide aircraft for deployment on the UK’s new carriers.

U.S. NAVY PHOTO COURTESY OF LOCKHEED MARTIN

Currently, the USMC F-35Bs operate off both the full-size US Navy carriers and the smaller Wasp-class amphibious assault ships. The greater size of the Queen Elizabeth class will give the US pilots considerably more deck space in which to operate. As the USMC is the air arm with the most experience of the highly sophisticated ‘B’ variant of the Lockheed Martin aircraft, the UK will be able to take advantage of that expertise to build up its own body of knowledge of the type’s abilities during the initial joint deployment – and beyond.

The US squadron will operate alongside a UK one, but as well as practising onboard interoperability, HMS Queen Elizabeth will be working alongside US missile destroyers, frigates and nuclear hunter-killer submarines as part of CSG21. First, however, the UK’s own F-35Bs will start to work up on the carrier. ‘Last year was massively successful from the point of view of being able to launch and recover F-35Bs from the deck’, Utley confirms.

US Marine Corps F-35B jets are due to take part in HMS Queen Elizabeth’s first operational deployment in 2021, highlighting the depth of the levels of interoperability between the UK and US.

This year, HMS Queen Elizabeth will spend more than three months in the Western Atlantic working up in the Westlant19 deployment: ‘This will be the first time that we have front-line jets embarked and learning to operate them from the ship in an operational context, moving towards a warfighting capability’. To help co-ordinate UK and US carrier operations, since 2014 the Strategic Effects and Forces Alignment Board has existed to align deployments of the ‘very capable but scarce assets’, reveals Utley. ‘We’re extremely closely linked in how we work those together, so we don’t duplicate our efforts’.

As well as this bilateral co-operation, the UK will also be practising interoperability with the

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wider NATO Alliance and expeditionary forces: From the end of 2020, the carrier will be declared to the NATO Readiness Initiative, particularly in the Atlantic theatre of operations. As part of that multilateral interoperability, 2021 will also see a Dutch warship deploying alongside a UK carrier. This will involve a liaison officer from each ship cross-decking to the other and ‘a certain degree of cross-pollination will happen. With the Netherlands, we train them at Flag Officer Sea Training off Portland, so they are very aware of the way British units operate and we speak the same language on radio circuits and on tactics’.

In addition to the close NATO partnership, the UK and US will also be prepared to operate

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together in a coalition operation that does not involve the Alliance. Additionally, interoperability with other nations will be an ongoing feature of the QEC. ‘Every time those ships go to sea, they will work with other nations’.

Importantly, however, ‘We will always be interoperable with the US, but with the carrier capability we have a UK core strike capability meaning that, we will always have the choice to use it as a national asset’.

U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS KENNETH ABBATE ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT ALEX CEOLIN, CROWN COPYRIGHT

Left: RN vessels are regularly deployed as part of USN Carrier Strike Groups, underlining the concept of US/UK naval interoperability. Below: Most, if not all, of HMS Prince of Wales’ deployments will be with warships from partner nations, especially those from NATO.

USMC REVEALS ALL Lieutenant General Steven R Rudder, Deputy Commandant of United States Marine Corps Aviation, highlights the significance of the USMC F-35B participation in HMS Queen Elizabeth’s maiden operational deployment in 2021 – Carrier Strike Group 21 (CSG21). Simon Michell reports.

USMC PHOTO BY SGT CHARLES PLOUFFE

USMC PHOTO

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he United States Marine Corps (USMC) has a longstanding history with the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) progression with the F-35B Lightning fast jet. Pilots from the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Navy (RN) trained alongside Marines in MCAS Beaufort in South Carolina as part of the Corps’ F-35B training squadron, VMFAT-501. According to the Deputy Commandant of USMC Aviation, Lt Gen Steven R Rudder, ‘The UK has made tremendous strides with the F-35B, quickly standing up their own F-35B squadron (617 Squadron) and preparing for the first deployment of HMS Queen Elizabeth’. He continues, ‘The Queen Elizabeth Class (QEC) of carriers was designed around the F-35. As a result, its ship-aircraft integration is remarkable. We look forward to achieving a high level of interoperability with such a significant ally’.

The deployment of US F-35B aircraft aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth for her maiden operational deployment in 2021 – Carrier Strike Group 21 (CSG21) – represents a major milestone for the programme, and marks a tremendous highpoint in the progression of maritime interoperability with the UK. Rudder points out that there has been a great deal of thought put into aligning the UK and Marine Corps pre-deployment training objectives and plans, and he firmly believes that this will help to embed a high degree of interoperability by aligning operational efforts during the deployment.

Before the maiden deployment there will be a further opportunity to train together, this time in British waters, as Rudder reveals: ‘The Pre-deployment Training Program (PTP) for CSG21 will take place in UK waters between the Fall of 2020 and Spring of 2021. This intensive period of activity will culminate in a certification exercise prior to the deployment. Integrating Marine F-35Bs and UK F-35Bs aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth for CSG21 will mark a tremendous milestone in the progression of maritime interoperability with the UK’.

As for the USMC contribution to the deployment, the General is naturally cautious about disclosing too many details, ‘Due to operational security concerns,

we do not release approximate numbers for deploying units’. That said, he puts this into context by explaining, ‘The Marine Corps plans to support the CSG21 deployment with an F-35B detachment, which is traditionally smaller than a squadron’. He is equally reticent about the timelines, saying only, ‘The only information available for the deployment timeline is that the Marine F-35B detachment will be deployed for approximately six months’.

Although US assets and personnel will be deployed on the new aircraft carrier, the deployment itself is a wholly British sovereign activity, meaning that the USMC aircraft will not undertake any US-centric missions. Rudder confirms, ‘There are no unique Marine Corps activities. The Marine Corps is contributing an F-35B detachment for CSG21 on this sovereign UK deployment’. And, when the CSG21 deployment does eventually take place, it will be an extraordinary reinforcement of the close relationship that the F-35B and QEC warships will have established between two of the world’s most interoperable nations.

Lt Gen Steven R Rudder, deputy commandant of United States Marine Corps Aviation.

USMC F-35B Lightning fast jets will deploy on HMS Queen Elizabeth’s maiden operational deployment, underlining the highest level of interoperability between two nations.

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PREPARING THE HOMEPORT The work to prepare Portsmouth for the arrival of HMS Queen Elizabeth in 2017 and HMS Prince of Wales in 2019 was a mammoth and dangerous task.

Simon Michell talks to the Queen’s Harbour Master to find out what this work entailed.

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ortsmouth is probably the second busiest port in the country after Dover. We manage about 200,000 movements a year, including the Royal Navy (RN) warships, the cross-channel and Isle of Wight ferries, as well as a growing amount of commercial shipping. Portsmouth is where Fyffes bananas enter the country before ending up in your local supermarket’, explains the man who supervises all this activity, the Queen’s Harbour Master: Steve Hopper.

Hopper is very proud of the new commercial enterprises the port has managed to attract. Portsmouth is now also a major national sport and leisure site. ‘We have seven large marinas, there are over 3,500 moorings – more than at the Hamble which is the home of British yachting. Portsmouth even plays host to the world’s most famous yacht race – the America’s Cup’.

Portsmouth has only managed to remain such a booming site thanks to its continual evolution and reinvention. The next phase of this process is now complete – the modifications to enable the Royal Navy’s largest ever ships to make the port their home for the next 50 years. The refurbishment has covered a broad scope of activities – a new Vessel Traffic Management System (VTMS), a lengthened jetty, dredging, new harbour navigation aids, a special power supply substation and last, but not least, giant gangways so people can get on and off the new Queen Elizabeth-class carriers.

The upgrade programme on land One of the early parts of the £100 million Portsmouth upgrade programme was the installation of a new £5.5 million Vessel Traffic Monitoring System (VTMS). Although not strictly part of the Queen Elizabeth readiness programme, the old VTMS was becoming obsolescent and needed changing, having been originally installed in

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1999. The new Kongsberg VTMS provides Hopper and his Harbour Services team improved situational awareness so that they can keep a close eye on the bustling ships, ferries, yachts, and naval vessels that are constantly criss-crossing the waters. ‘We have got more radars, better cameras, better computers. It makes everything more robust and easier to manage’, he explains. With two 65,000tonne aircraft carriers about to be sailing in and out of the harbour, the new system is an essential element for ensuring the safety of all harbour users and operators.

There is now a pair of jetties capable of handling the two massive carriers: Princess Royal Jetty, which has already hosted HMS Queen Elizabeth, and the recently refurbished Victory Jetty. The RN has decided that the Princess Royal Jetty will be the maintenance berth for the carriers, and Victory Jetty will be the operational berth.

So when HMS Prince of Wales enters Portsmouth for the first time she will go straight onto Princess Royal Jetty.

VolkerStevin, the company that built the ammunition storage facility for the Type 45 destroyers in 2012, was awarded the jetty contract back in April 2015, just two

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT DAN ROSENBAUM, CROWN COPYRIGHT

HMS Queen Elizabeth sets sail from HMNB Portsmouth to conduct her second deployment to the United States.

months ahead of BAE Systems and Kongsberg winning the VTMS contract.

One of the most important carrier support systems, the power supply substation that converts the National Grid’s 50Hz power into the 60Hz used by all ships, is located between the jetty and Old Portsmouth. Weighing in at a huge 100 tonnes, the new frequency converter and motor represent an impressive feat of engineering. Now hooked up to the National Grid via 2.6 miles of cabling, they produce enough electricity to power a small town.

Getting onto and off the aircraft carriers will require two gangways on a scale never yet seen in a British naval port. Designed by the Dutch firm Verhoef, the brows, as they are known in maritime lingo, will be big enough to cater for 3,000 people coming and going per hour. They were delivered in September 2016, ready for an intensive training programme to make sure everyone knew how to operate them before HMS Queen Elizabeth arrived in August 2017.

Modifications in the water Whilst all these enhancements have been in progress on land, there have been two major projects to make the waters of the harbour and its entrance ready for the leviathans to start using it. One of the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) leading dredging firms, the Hampshire-based Boskalis Westminster UK, won the £30 million contract to widen and deepen the 5-mile approach channel in July 2015. In all, about 3 million cubic metres of clay, sand and gravel have been scooped out by suction hopper and backhoe dredgers over an eight-month period. Care was taken not only to ensure that damage to the environment was kept to an absolute minimum, but also that they did not get blown up by German bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe as part of their failed air campaign to put the dockyard out of commission during World War II. During the dredging, four major unexploded bombs were unearthed. A massive 500kg

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ID: 6096-001-06/2019. Š FUJITSU 2019

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT PAUL HALL, CROWN COPYRIGHT

bomb was found in November 2016. Such was the danger that Portsmouth’s Gunwharf shopping centre and the Historic Dockyard had to be evacuated whilst Royal Navy explosive ordnance teams carried out a controlled explosion. Of all the elements to the work this is the one that makes Hopper most nervous, ‘I think to myself that I am dealing with a really big bomb here and there is a young RN diver swimming just a few yards away from it’.

Entering the harbour Getting in and out of the harbour for a ship the size of HMS Prince of Wales will not be a simple manoeuvre, as at more than 70 metres wide she is twice the width of the previous Invincibleclass carriers. This means she has to be positioned precisely within the newly dredged channel. To help the crew do this, giant navigation aids have been placed along the route into and out of the narrow harbour entrance. These are no ordinary navigation lights. Powered by a combination of solar panels and batteries, they sit on top of 14 huge steel towers that rise some 30 metres

Queen’s Harbour Master Steven Hopper.

above the seabed. Weighing in at over 22 tonnes, each tower had to be lifted into place by a 350-tonne crane barge. ‘The lights atop the towers will only be switched on when one of the carriers is moving, but because the dredging work has slightly altered the direction of the main channel, a beacon has been put in for the other ports users, which will be permanently switched on’, says Hopper. This is just one more facet to the refurbishment that will benefit others beyond the aircraft carriers and their crews.

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Captain Nick Walker, formerly of the of the Royal Navy’s Carrier Strike and Aviation team, explains to Simon Michell how a Carrier Strike Group is able to defend itself on operations.

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aval warships are designed from the outset to be able to sail to a problem and deliver a solution, offering a range of responses from armed intervention to diplomatic influence.

The ultimate expression of this power projection is the flexible, versatile and globally deployable Carrier Strike Group (CSG). Nothing has the ability to concentrate an adversary’s mind more than the imminent arrival of a flotilla of heavily armed ships with, at its core, an aircraft carrier: a well-found aviation operating base capable of projecting power through its air group, consisting of fast jets and attack, surveillance, and support helicopters.

In times of tension or conflict, an adversary may try and counter the potency of the CSG through direct attack. As a result, a CSG has to

Pictured here is the Type 23 frigate HMS Montrose. Anti-submarine warfare weapon systems and sensors enable Type 23 frigates to defend against torpedo attack.

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defend itself against a wide spectrum of threats. Capt Nick Walker, who has flown from and sailed in all three of the UK’s previous Invincibleclass carriers and has held the position of commander air, explains, ‘There is no primary threat, but a range of dangers depending on where you are operating and what type of opposing force you are likely to encounter’. According to Walker, at least for the time being, the potential for a CSG squaring up to another large fleet on the high seas is remote. That does, however, leave a raft of other dangers to consider. Walker goes on, ‘Potential adversaries could employ a combination of submarines, surface ships, and aircraft against the CSG’.

Added to that, depending on how close you are to an adversary’s coastline there is also a threat from land-based missile and coastal defence systems as well as small fast-attack craft.

Most recent attacks on warships have been from a mixture of conventional and asymmetric assaults. The attack on the American guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in 2000 was prosecuted by a small

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT RORY ARNOLD, CROWN COPYRIGHT

DEFENCE IN DEPTH

A Royal Navy Wildcat helicopter from 815 Squadron.

Wildcat helicopters are able to chase down fast attack craft and neutralise them before they can reach their target.

fibreglass boat filled to the brim with explosives.

Some 16 years later, another US guided-missile destroyer, USS Mason, launched countermeasures as it was sailing near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to fend off a putative cruise missile attack. In February 2017, the Saudi Arabian frigate Al Madinah was hit by an unmanned speedboat that exploded on impact. More recently, in June 2018, Houthi Rebels are reported to have fired missiles from the port of Houdeidah at a Saudi-led naval contingent, hitting one of the warships.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT STEVIE BURKE, CROWN COPYRIGHT

Integrated defence A proven way to counter the gamut of possible threats is to use an integrated, or layered, defence consisting of submarines, frigates, destroyers and their embarked helicopters, together with the carrier air group supported by land-based aircraft where access permission has been granted by a host nation. These elements operate both defensively and offensively at varying distances to create outer, medium and inner cordons. ‘Ideally, we will engage or negate threats at range, and because the threats can be diverse you need different capabilities to counteract them’, explains Walker. For example, Type 23 frigates and Type 45 destroyers can both neutralise threats from surface vessels, but the frigates specialise in anti-submarine warfare and the destroyers in air defence. Submarines can also target a surface vessel, and as Walker points out, ‘an enemy submarine may best be neutralised by one of our own submarines’.

The CSG associated aircraft, based on the carrier and her escorts, also have specialisms. The Queen Elizabeth-class carriers’ F-35B fast jets represent the very apex of air-to-air and air-to-surface capability. This fifth-generation aircraft also has a suite of incredibly advanced sensors able to search for potential threats. Merlin HM.2 helicopters have the world’s most modern equipment designed specifically to seek out and destroy submarines. This is true of the Royal Air Force’s recently acquired P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, which can be added as an additional layer if necessary once it achieves initial operating capability in April 2020.

Wildcat HMA.2 helicopters have anti-surface vessel and ASW weaponry and are particularly adept at chasing down the sort of fast-attack craft that attacked USS Mason and the Royal Saudi Arabian Navy frigate. Merlin Mk. 4 ‘Junglies’ can also be used to transport Royal Marines ashore, and conduct stores movements and Joint Personnel Recovery should someone need rescuing.

The innermost layer consists of smaller calibre armaments, and in the case of HMS Prince of Wales include the Phalanx close-in weapon system, miniguns, and general purpose machine guns (GPMGs).

Phalanx, an automatically controlled anti-missile cannon, can also down a fast jet if it manages to get through the outer cordons. The miniguns and GPMGs are shorter-range guns invaluable for keeping smaller boats and fast-attack craft at bay.

Cyber defence As well as physical threats, any CSG also has to factor in cyber warfare. This is a relatively new discipline and not as well understood as more traditional methods of attack. As Walker points out, ‘The totality of a concerted cyberattack against a maritime task group is challenging to quantify’. However, military systems have an advantage over commercial or civilian systems as they are designed to be able to sustain damage through redundancy and continue to operate in

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ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT KYLE HELLER, CROWN COPYRIGHT ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT RORY ARNOLD, CROWN COPYRIGHT

Above: An F-35B lands after deploying the first Paveway II bombs from HMS Queen Elizabeth. The F-35B Lightning represents one of the most formidable defence elements of any QEC task group. Right: The Type 45 destroyer HMS Duncan protecting shipping lanes in the Arabian Gulf.

The Daring-class Type 45 destroyers specialise in protecting maritime task groups from air attack.

contested cyber environments through agility and the application of advanced technology. If a part of a system or network is neutralised there is an alternative way of completing the task at hand. ‘We design and build in as much redundancy as possible. For example, we build into communication and control systems the ability to be agile – hopefully more agile than the cyber attacker’, says Walker. Equally, we may employ our own technology to disrupt enemy capabilities, rendering them ineffective.

Intelligence-led defence The most ubiquitous element in the defence network is the Royal Navy’s intelligence-led threat analysis. ‘The preparation for every deployment – even routine peacetime deployments – involves thorough intelligence analysis to understand potential threats before we deploy’, explains Walker. This highly detailed assessment informs the planners as to the optimum protective formation required. Threat levels are different depending on

where the deployment will operate.

Therefore, if a particular threat is more prominent, the protective layers are tailored accordingly.

There is not a single formation that applies to each deployment. Sometimes it may not be possible to deploy one of the protective layers, particularly if it requires overseas host-nation support, but this does not mean the deployment can’t take place. What is true, though, is that there is an irreducible minimum level of protection. As Walker confirms, ‘We don’t tie the carrier to a set level of defence, but we will always make sure the CSG has the right level of protection and the right capabilities for where it is going and how it is going to be used’.

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SUPPORTERS CLUB

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO/CROWN COPYRIGHT

The Royal Fleet Auxiliary has introduced a fleet of four modern Tide-class tankers whose primary role is to support the Queen Elizabeth-class (QEC) aircraft carriers.

Simon Michell talks to the managing director of A&P Group to find out how they were customised for this role.

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upporting Royal Navy (RN) ships at sea became a major priority with the transition from sail to steam power at the turn of the last century. The engines that drove RN ships from continent to continent consumed huge amounts of coal, which needed restocking on a regular basis. And, hence, since the introduction of engines, the Royal Navy has been shadowed at sea

by Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) support ships capable of replenishing sailors with food, water, ammunition, and, of course, fuel.

Manned by civilians, and owned by the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the RFA is far more than a floating mobile pitstop service. The organisation supports the RN during peacetime and in times of conflict. It also undertakes deployments by itself, with its ships operating independently on the nation’s behalf offering reassurance to British Overseas Territories, contributing to disaster relief operations, and playing a part in counter-piracy

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Aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth and new supply ship RFA Tidespring met up for the first time in February 2018 to undertake a Replenishment at Sea (RAS), refuelling whilst underway at sea, in what was the first complete RAS between the new ships.

and anti-narcotics operations. The impressive fleet includes replenishment vessels and tankers for dry stores and liquid fuel, a 100-bed casualty ship (RFA Argus) and three Bay-class floating docks that can transfer personnel, stores, and equipment from ship to shore during beach assault operations.

Although the RFA has had to play its part in the austerity measures brought on by the financial crisis, it has also very nearly completed the process of refreshing its support fleet with four brand-new double-hulled Tide-class tankers to replace the single-hulled vessels that no longer

RFA ships Tidespring, Tideforce and Fort Victoria conduct RAS exercises off the southwest coast of England in May 2019.

comply with international (MARPOL – marine pollution) environmental standards.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT PAUL HALL, CROWN COPYRIGHT

The Tide-class tankers Although suitable for supporting the full spectrum of RN and alliance/partner nation warships, the primary function of the four 37,000-tonne Tide-class tankers is to provide ship and aircraft fuel and fluids to the Queen Elizabeth-class (QEC) aircraft carriers at much faster rates than the ships they are replacing. To do this they have been fitted with equipment that offers much improved transfer rates alongside a dual-hose capability that was not available on the earlier vessels. This superior capability is required to ensure that the two QEC aircraft carriers can be sufficiently replenished in realistic timeframes.

Based on a British design from BMT Defence Services, and built in South Korea by Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co, the ships – Tidespring, Tiderace, Tidesurge and Tideforce - have now all arrived in the UK and have been prepared for introduction into the RFA. The first-in-class, RFA Tidespring,

docked at A&P Falmouth on April 2, 2017 to begin 17 weeks of intensive customisation work, after which she completed sea trials and was handed over to the RFA in November 2017. The fourth-in-class, RFA Tideforce, arrived in Falmouth in August 2018, and following modification, will be ready for operations by the end of 2019, having been welcomed into service on July 30, 2019. According to the A&P Group Managing Director David McGinley, the new Tide-class vessels offer a step-change in capability, including improved: • self-defence; • crew comfort and facilities for accommodation and working spaces; • automation, enabling reduced crew numbers; and • Replenishment at Sea (RAS) rigs.

A&P Falmouth, which already supports a number of RFA vessels, including the Bay-class ships and RFA Argus, won the contract to customise and support the new vessels in a hotly contested competition that was awarded in January 2015. McGinley explains how the programme has been developed: ‘Prior to the arrival of each Tideclass vessel, the A&P project team developed more than 40 customised design packages using our own in-house design capability together with a collaborative approach with key equipment, systems and military suppliers’. He continues, ‘A period of production then took place to deliver key capability upgrades and equipment commissioning needed to support the Royal Navy’. Work also included delivering safety and environment assessment packages to all four vessels and facilitating direct stores.

As part of the programme, A&P also managed the full military capability trials for the vessels before they were introduced into service. These trials demonstrated and proved the full capability of each vessel, including aviation/helicopter landing and RAS. The trials primarily took place on the south coast and western approaches, but also went as far as Scotland and into the mid-Atlantic.

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The first of the Tide-class tankers, RFA Tidespring, arrived in the UK for customisation work in March 2017.

CROWN COPYRIGHT PHOTO

Supporting the Tide-class tankers A&P now provides in-service support to the Tide class around the world on operations, during humanitarian relief missions, and throughout routine peacetime deployments.

During the build programme, the company has not just sat back and waited for the ships to come to them; they supported the vessels even before they left South Korea, working with the ship’s staff and the Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) team who are located in Falmouth.

For example, along the route to the UK, A&P supported Tidespring in Japan, Hawaii, and Panama, McGinley confirms.

On arrival, each vessel was docked at A&P Falmouth for a 17-week customisation period. Throughout this period A&P was responsible for coordinating all work on the vessels, whether this was an in-service repair or alongside maintenance or capability upgrade.

During these continued times of austerity, every penny counts, and so cost savings are always high on the agenda. Not surprisingly, McGinley is keen to extol his company’s ability to work efficiently and reduce the money spent on the programme: ‘A&P Group operates on a low-cost reactive business model, designed to flex to the work as and when required. In order to save on expenses, A&P completed a significant amount of work at A&P Falmouth rather than in South Korea, reducing the associated travel and subsistence costs’. Furthermore, A&P and the RFA work collaboratively to review and plan all scope of works to reduce costs whilst improving vessel capability.

The RFA has been quick to integrate the Tide-class ships within RN activities, and on Feb. 26, 2018, RFA Tidespring successfully completed the first replenishment at sea (RAS) with HMS Queen Elizabeth.

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Rear Admiral Martin Connell, assistant chief of naval staff (aviation and carrier strike) tells Lindsay Peacock why the F-35B is a game-changer for the United Kingdom’s Carrier Enabled Power Projection (CEPP) capability.

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ore than two decades after signing up and seven years after the first Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning for the United Kingdom (UK) was officially accepted in July 2012 by the then Defence Secretary Philip Hammond at Fort Worth, Texas, the programme is at last gathering pace. Tangible proof of this is provided by the fact that both of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers have been completed, and operational employment of the principal combat asset – the F-35 – has begun. It would therefore appear to be an opportune moment to look at recent developments with the Lightning and to consider where it will be heading in the next few years.

Current planning anticipates procurement of 138 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning combat aircraft for service with the UK armed forces, of which 18 have so far been delivered. Apart from three retained in the United States for trials and development work with 17 Test and Evaluation Squadron (TES), the majority are now in the UK at RAF Marham, which is the home base for the Lightning Force. This received its first four F-35Bs on June 6, 2018, when 617 Squadron (Sqn) took up residence after forming in the United States in April 2018. Another five F-35Bs followed on Aug. 3, 2018, with the most recent transatlantic ferry flight involving six aircraft that arrived on July 16 of this year, allowing 207 Sqn to officially stand up at Marham as the F-35 Operational Conversion Unit with effect from August 1.

A more significant milestone was passed in January 2019 with the announcement that an Initial Operational Capability (IOC) Land had been achieved and this was followed by the first operational missions on June 16 when RAF F-35s flew over Syria and Iraq as part of Operation ‘Shader’. Looking ahead, another 24 aircraft should arrive by 2023, allowing 809 Naval Air Squadron to form in April of that year, as well as enabling the attainment of Full Operational Capability (FOC) by the end of 2023.

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According to Rear Adm Martin Connell, assistant chief of naval staff (aviation and carrier strike) the F-35B is a game-changer in terms of UK carrier strike capabilities.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO, CROWN COPYRIGHT

LIGHTNING STRIKES

At present, RAF Marham is still in the process of getting up to speed. Major construction work has been ongoing for several years in readiness for the Lightning, making it necessary to accomplish early pilot and engineer training in the United States. This has now ended, with Marham’s Integrated Training Centre (ITC) launching its first pilot course for five students on July 1, 2019. Initial instruction was wholly classroom- and simulator-based, with the live flying segment commencing in early September. Three of the students on this course were from the Navy, one of whom will shortly assume command of 617 Sqn. With regard to trade training, this has been undertaken in the UK since mid-October 2018, and the ITC is responsible for courses for all of the ground trades associated with the

Lightning. More than 400 students have undergone various courses at Marham, of which just over 200 are primarily concerned with engineering, the ITC having completed two of each main trade course (mechanical and avionics) and two weapons courses.

F-35Bs during night flying trials aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth in 2018.

LOCKHEED MARTIN PHOTO BY DAVE WIEDMANN

The Queen Elizabeth class Elsewhere, on the carrier front, HMS Queen Elizabeth has completed her first overseas deployment and went back to sea on August 30 for a return trip to the Western Atlantic (Westlant 19) that will end in December. This is intended to facilitate operational testing onboard of UK Lightning aircraft, plus personnel from 17 TES, 207 Sqn, and 617 Sqn. The next stage – planned to take place in 2020 – will see 207 Squadron conduct carrier qualifications of an initial cadre of pilots and instructors, with carrier strike group integration training of UK and USMC Lightnings to follow later in the year. All of this preparation will open the way for the maiden operational

deployment by HMS Queen Elizabeth as part of a carrier strike group in 2021. The UK contingent for that will be provided by 617 Sqn, which will embark alongside a US Marine Corps F-35B squadron. Sea trials of the second carrier – HMS Prince of Wales – are underway and she will conduct a similar work up programme with UK Lightnings in 2021, before making her first operational deployment in 2024.

Rear Adm Martin Connell, assistant chief of naval staff (aviation and carrier strike), has no doubt at all that the Lightning is assuredly a ‘game changer’ by virtue of possessing genuine multi-role

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capability as well as low-observable (LO) attributes that render it hard to detect and counter. This means that a single aircraft can simultaneously perform roles and missions previously entrusted to several different types. Air-to-air operations, offensive and defensive counter air operations, electronic attack, and intelligence-gathering all fall comfortably with the Lightning’s ambit. It is compatible with an extensive array of weapons, some of which are housed internally to maximise ‘stealth’, but more can be carried externally in a permissive environment. Situational awareness offered by the highly advanced sensor suite not only keeps the pilot ‘fully in the game’, but also gives him or her the ability to respond more swiftly and effectively than an opponent. Moreover, the

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LOCKHEED MARTIN PHOTO BY THINH D. NGUYEN

The F-35B’s advanced sensor suite allows it to perform roles and missions previously carried out by multiple aircraft types.

F-35 can collect, analyse, and share data with other elements of a carrier strike group or other platforms, as well as with troops on the ground via secure data link systems.

At the core of all this is the Multifunction Integrated RF System/Multifunction Nose Array (MIRFS/MNA) suite, which marries Northrop Grumman’s AN/APG-81 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar with formidable electronic warfare and communications functions, enabling the Lightning to undertake network attack and perform advanced jamming. This system allows the F-35 to reach and engage well-defended targets, while simultaneously suppressing hostile air defence radars and thus eliminating the need for dedicated electronic attack aircraft support.

To sum up, the Lightning is, fundamentally, a powerful force multiplier, capable of enhancing all airborne, surface, and ground-based assets in the battlespace. In British service, the F-35 will follow the lead set by a previous STOVL aircraft – the Harrier – in being assigned to and operated by a joint force organisation that is composed of Royal Navy and RAF personnel, who will be equally at home flying from land bases or an aircraft carrier.

MILITARY ENGINES

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The U.S. Air Force’s B-52 Stratofortress makes its maiden flight, powered by eight Pratt & Whitney J57 engines.

1961 The B-52H, the final variant of the aircraft built, enters service with Pratt & Whitney’s TF33 engines.

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THE RETURN OF 809 SQUADRON ‘THE IMMORTALS’ A

lthough not due to be operational for a few more years, the first Fleet Air Arm (FAA) Lightning squadron will be 809 Naval Air Squadron (NAS), known as ‘The Immortals’ from the motto on their squadron badge. The squadron has had a fascinating and varied history, albeit a very sporadic one, having been disbanded and reformed many times since the early days of World War II. Appropriately, the squadron’s phoenix emblem symbolises the rebirth of the fixed-wing Fleet Air Arm after years of dormancy. The ‘new’ 809 NAS will stand up in 2023, by which time the UK should have around 35 F-35Bs in service, and both carriers at full operational capability. It will take its place alongside 617 Sqn, the RAF’s operational Lightning unit, and 207 Sqn, the OCU (Operational Conversion Unit), which also has a

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naval heritage, being originally formed as 7 Sqn RNAS in 1916.

Tracing its origins to its formation at St. Merryn, Cornwall in January 1941, 809 NAS initially flew Fairey Fulmar fighters. With these it took part in strikes on Norway and escorted Arctic convoys, attacked the Tirpitz, was part of Operation Pedestal bringing supplies to Malta in August

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM PHOTO

Captain James Blackmore is currently involved in rebuilding the Royal Navy’s carrier strike focus as he serves as commander air group (CAG) for the UK Carrier Strike Group. Jim Winchester speaks with him about the squadron destined to be the second front-line F-35B Lightning unit.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE ROYAL NAVY

1942, and from Spring 1943 flew Supermarine Seafires in the Mediterranean and Far East.

Post-war, 809 operated de Havilland Sea Hornets, and in the 1956 Suez Crisis, the squadron’s de Havilland Sea Venoms struck Egyptian targets from HMS Albion.

Reformed as the operational flying training squadron for the Blackburn Buccaneer S.1 in 1963, 809 was disbanded in 1965, only to reform in 1966 on the Buccaneer S.2. This era would be the longest for the squadron, lasting until 1978, when they disbanded as the last RN ‘Bucc’ unit.

Flying from HMS Ark Royal, 809 made a notable show-of-force mission in 1972 when two aircraft flew over British Honduras (now Belize) as part of a successful effort to dissuade Guatemalan forces from invading.

The phoenix rose again in April 1982, when a ‘scratch’ squadron of Sea Harriers was formed at the height of the Falklands conflict. Eight aircraft were brought together from storage, training and trials duties, and pilots were called back from exchange programmes or found in the RAF Harrier force, while ratings came from training unit 899 Sqn. The squadron flew to Ascension Island, and from that mid-Atlantic island they embarked the container ship Atlantic Conveyer for the journey south. Flying off to the aircraft carriers HMS Invincible and HMS Hermes, the eight Sea Harriers and their pilots were split between 800 and 801 Squadrons, but 809 continued its existence at Yeovilton, working up to full operational status. In early August the squadron sailed on the newly commissioned HMS Illustrious for the South Atlantic.

The Sea Harriers rotated ashore from ‘Lusty’ to provide air defence for Port Stanley while the airport was upgraded to accept RAF Phantoms.

Opposite: A Fairey Fulmar of 809 Naval Air Squadron (NAS) leaves the flight deck of HMS Victorious in 1941.

Top: Officers and ratings of 809 NAS on formation with one of the squadron’s Fairey Fulmars at RNAS Lee on Solent in January 1941. Above: An 809 Squadron Supermarine Seafire landing on HMS Stalker in 1944.

The squadron sailed on HMS Illustrious for the United Kingdom in late October and after spending some time in the Caribbean and US East Coast, 809 was disbanded on Dec. 17, 1982.

At the time, a few lines were penned by an anonymous 809 member, who foresaw the squadron would one day return: Alas too soon the day draws nigh When the Phoenix squadron must cease to fly, Though fire and flames are forced to dwindle, The immortal spark awaits rekindle.

The snuffing out could hardly be faster, But watch the BIRD at the next disaster!

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Left: A de Havilland Sea Venom of 809 NAS, painted in Operation Musketeer ‘invasion stripes’ taxies to the catapult aboard HMS Albion during the Suez Crisis in 1956.

Below: A Buccaneer S.2 of 809 NAS prepares to launch from HMS Ark Royal during the aircraft carrier’s final commission in 1977-78. 809 was the last Royal Navy squadron to operate the Buccaneer.

The phoenix indeed remained dormant until it was announced in September 2013 that 809 would become the UK’s third F-35 Lightning squadron.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE ROYAL NAVY

Commander Air Group As a lieutenant commander, James Blackmore flew the last Harrier GR.9 off HMS Ark Royal on Nov. 24, 2010. Today, Capt Blackmore is aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth as the Commander Air Group (CAG) as the carrier sails on WESTLANT 19 for further F-35B sea trials.

Why was 809 Sqn chosen? ‘Its heritage as a long-serving naval air squadron having flown numerous naval aircraft in the maritime strike role’, is the main reason, says Blackmore, but there are other historical parallels, including its use of aircraft also flown by the RAF. ‘Jointery goes back as far as the Seafire, which was a maritime version of the Spitfire’, he points out.

Preparations for the Immortals to return are underway. ‘We are already training the pilots and maintainers who will stand up at RAF Marham in 2023. In January/February 2020 we will start carrier qualifications for the first ab initio pilots on 207 Sqn’. Some of these aviators will go on to form the core of the reborn 809 NAS. When Blackmore flew that last GR.9 off HMS Ark Royal in 2010, it was as part of the Joint Force Harrier, consisting of one FAA and two RAF Harrier squadrons, but things have changed a great deal since then. ‘We don’t call it a joint force because that’s so much a given these days’, says Blackmore.

‘The balance of personnel agreed some time ago

is 42 percent RN and 58 percent RAF, although the proportion waxes and wanes’. The first CO of 809 will be a Royal Navy pilot, although who it will be won’t be announced for a year or two. Next year, 617 will have an RN CO (when Cdr Mark Sparrow takes over in the first quarter of 2020). Trials unit 17 Sqn has had an RN CO, and 207 will have one in the future. ‘That’s just how joint it is’, reveals Blackmore.

By 2023, the UK will be able to deploy one carrier at sea with at least 24 aircraft in two squadrons. As Blackmore explains, ‘2023 is that landmark when we gain our capability as a carrier strike force, with 809 and 617 Sqns, augmented with a third squadron if needed, which could be from the United States Marine Corps, and 809 is at the centre of that capability. It’s fantastic that a squadron with such a history will be flying alongside 617 Sqn with its own huge heritage’.

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‘DAMBUSTERS’ 617 SQUADRON

Chris Aaron speaks to Wing Commander John Butcher of 617 Squadron about preparations for the F-35B Lightning deployment to HMS Queen Elizabeth in 2021.

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ate August in Norfolk. The night sky is racked by the shuddering roar and green glow of F-35B aircraft, jointly owned by the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, landing at RAF Marham. Three USAF B-2 Spirits land at RAF Fairford later that night, and F-35B Lightnings from the RAF’s 617 Squadron (Sqn) conduct flying integration training with them the next day, the first time any other country’s aircraft have operated alongside the B-2s. Group Captain (Gp Capt) Richard Yates, chief of staff at United Kingdom (UK) Air Battle Staff, later states: ’This flying integration builds on the work of Exercise Lightning Dawn in Cyprus and the visit of RAF F-35B Lightnings to Italy in June’.

Despite this first for the RAF, the atmosphere on base is relaxed during the drive over to 617 Sqn’s buildings, past the newly opened facilities of 207 Sqn Operational Conversion Unit (OCU) with its six aircraft and state-of-the-art simulators, into the as-yet unfinished car park, and in through the rabbit warren of corridors, to Wing Commander (Wg Cdr) John Butcher’s office, his windows overlooking the trees and humped shelters of the squadron’s nine F-35B Lightnings.

Dambusters reborn 617 Sqn ‘The Dambusters’ was stood up as an operational squadron at a ceremony in Washington, DC on April 18, 2018. General Stephen Wilson, vice chief of staff for the US Air Force said at the time, ‘The Dambusters will be flying the F-35 Lightning, a fifth-generation air

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fighter ready to deter and win. We will take it to the skies together again’.

Four of the squadron’s aircraft took to the skies from US Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort for the 10-hour transatlantic flight to RAF Marham on June 6, 2018, and six months later the squadron achieved Initial Operating Capability (IOC) Land on Jan. 10, 2019. Meanwhile, on Sept. 28, 2018, two F-35Bs flown by Royal Navy and RAF pilots based at Beaufort had touched down on the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth as the aircraft carrier exercised on the eastern seaboard of the United States. That landing marked the beginning of two months of trials, which also included establishing the limits of weather conditions for safe landing on board the UK’s Queen Elizabeth-class carriers.

The next milestone for the squadron’s operational development was the six-week deployment to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus on May 23, 2019.

‘Lightning Dawn’ involved tactical flight training and live-fire exercises, but most importantly, it proved the logistical capability of the squadron, with its technicians, support, and operations staff, to operate effectively from a remote base.

During Lightning Dawn, the squadron carried out its first combat operation on June 16, providing armed overwatch to ground forces over Syria and Iraq as part of Operation Shader. On the way back to Marham, two of the squadron’s aircraft stopped off at the Italian Air Force base Amendola, to take part in drills with US and Italian F-35As. Part of this exercise was to practise use of the F-35’s Multi-function Advanced Data Link (MADL) – the system that enables situational

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Pictured are four of Britain’s new cuttingedge F-35B aircraft, flying over the UK in June 2018. The first of Britain’s new aircraft arrived into RAF Marham, their new home in Norfolk, touching down late in the evening after a trans-Atlantic flight from the United States, where Britain has more of the jets and 150 personnel in training.

awareness data to be shared between assets such as the F-35, F-22, B-2, and naval vessels equipped with Aegis combat systems. As several F-35 pilots have noted, the level of situational awareness provided to the pilot by the F-35’s internal and linked systems is one of the platform’s greatest advances and advantages.

Against this background, Butcher has a clear picture of the immediate priorities for 617 Sqn. In September, ’the whole squadron is flying from here as part of Exercise Cobra Warrior’, then ‘we are sending a contingent of personnel and aircraft to HMS Queen Elizabeth in October for Operational Testing (OT-1) which is the number one objective of the “WESTLANT 19” deployment.

The final figure is to be defined, but I think it will be up to 70 personnel in total, two pilots and up

to five aircraft. We also have Red Flag in the mix, coming up in January, and that is also a very high priority for us. That will be the first time we have flown in that kind of complex environment: it is clearly the best combat air exercise in the world’.

On top of these immediate priorities, Butcher has a carefully planned strategy for the longerterm objectives relating to preparations for HMS Queen Elizabeth’s first operational deployment – 2021 Carrier Strike Group (CSG21). This will see UK F-35Bs embarked alongside a contingent of USMC F-35Bs. ’What we’ve been doing since we arrived at RAF Marham is maintaining a readiness state across all our mission sets – the F-35 has got a pretty broad portfolio. Then adding the carrier in there as well is a new thing for us over the next couple of years’. He continues,

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Photo: Courtesy Babcock International Group

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IMAGERY CAPTURED BY A USAF EXCHANGE PILOT U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO BY STAFF SGT. ALEX ECHOLS

Left: A United States Air Force B-2 Spirit, deployed to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, flies above the English countryside near Dover with two RAF F-35B jets.

Right: Wg Cdr John Butcher answers questions during a media day for Exercise Point Blank 18-3 at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, in November 2018.

‘CSG21 is very important, but for the squadron, 2020 is actually more important because we have got to do four carrier qualifications for all of the squadron pilots in the summer of 2020 and then do the Group Sail test period in the Autumn of 2020, which is essentially the proving ground for us being able to operate together properly on CSG21’. ’As part of WESTLANT 19, OT-1 is a great opportunity for us to get some early exposure as

a squadron, and providing the resource to that is very important’, notes Butcher. ‘What we’ve done is identify the key posts that we want to give that early exposure to, so that it will be the right leadership to take 617 Sqn to the carrier for qualification and Group Sail next year’.

Butcher himself will be moving to a new post before then. ’We’ve got the right level of experience from previous platforms trying to drive that forward: I’ve flown off a carrier in the Harrier and in the F-18 Hornet, so I’ve seen that kind of operating environment before, and I know what to expect’. He concludes by reiterating just how important HMS Queen Elizabeth’s first operational deployment will be for the Dambusters, ‘CSG21 is ultimately what it’s about for us over the next two years or so. We’ve got a lot that we’ve got to get through to get there’.

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ROTARY UTILITY

A variety of helicopter types took part in the flypast for the official naming ceremony of HMS Prince of Wales at Rosyth Dockyard, Scotland, including Merlins, a Wildcat, a Sea King, and a Chinook.

HMS Prince of Wales and her sister ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, will not only carry the F-35B Lightning jet, they will also be home to helicopters from all three armed services as well as rotary assets from partner nations.

Richard Scott reports.

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hile the raison d’être for the Queen Elizabeth Class (QEC) is Carrier Strike – the delivery of offensive air power from the sea – it was recognised from the outset of the programme that rotary-wing aircraft would have a vital force protection role to play as part of the carrier air wing. Furthermore, the broader concept of Carrier Enabled Power Projection (CEPP) promotes the flight deck and aviation support facilities available on HM Ships Prince of Wales and Queen Elizabeth as an operating base for rotorcraft from all three services and, indeed, allies. This intent was reaffirmed in the Joint Force 2025 vision set out in the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR).

The responsibility for delivering underwater and above-surface force protection to the Carrier Strike Group is shouldered by the Royal Navy’s Merlin Helicopter Force, based at RNAS Culdrose in Cornwall. That force today comprises 30 Merlin HM Mk.2 aircraft, of which 25 are maintained in the forward fleet.

Merlin is a true multi-mission helicopter, but it is the aircraft’s anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capability that sets it apart. The upgrade to HM Mk.2 standard has included a package of sonics upgrades. From 2019, the Merlin force will add airborne surveillance and control (ASaC) to its repertoire. This capability, replacing that delivered by the venerable Sea King ASaC Mk. 7 until its

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retirement on Sept. 26, 2018, is being enabled through the introduction of the CROWSNEST radar and mission system role fit.

Lockheed Martin UK was awarded a £269 million contract to deliver the CROWSNEST programme in late 2016. The company is working in partnership with Thales (supplying a development of its Cerberus mission system and Searchwater radar) and Leonardo Helicopters (responsible for the production of 10 CROWSNEST role fit kits, and fixed fittings for all 30 Merlin helicopters). On March 28, 2019, the first Merlin HM Mk.2, fitted with the CROWSNEST system completed its first flight, and the new kit is on track to achieve initial operational capability in 2020.

In advance of the arrival of HMS Queen Elizabeth in the fleet, the Merlin force was re-purposed and re-brigaded to focus on carrier air group (CAG) operations in support of Carrier Strike Group operations. Current planning assumptions assume a CAG including 14 Merlins, typically a mix of nine for ASW plus five CROWSNEST-configured aircraft for the ASaC mission.

Exercise ‘Deep Blue’ in 2014 signalled the start of the process of building up the Merlin force to once again undertake high-tempo Task Group ASW operations. A total of nine aircraft were embarked on board HMS Illustrious for ‘Deep Blue’, with one more operating from the Type 23 frigate HMS Westminster. A follow-on ‘Deep Blue’ exercise was

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conducted from HMS Ocean in the Mediterranean during July 2016. Whereas the 2014 exercise was all about relearning the arts of sustained ASW operations from a carrier, ‘Deep Blue II’ was more oriented towards maritime force protection, involving a tailored air group comprising Merlin, Sea King, and Wildcat helicopters.

Imbuing the CAG mindset continued as the Merlin force built toward the introduction to service of Queen Elizabeth in 2018 (with entry into operational service due in 2020). However, plans to re-brigade the Merlin force have been adjusted to reflect the decision to maintain one QEC carrier at high readiness at all times and so deliver a Continuous Carrier Capability. 824 Naval Air Squadron (NAS) will retain its operational conversion unit status, while 814 NAS, 820 NAS, and 849 NAS (the latter to be the ASaCspecialist CROWSNEST squadron) will be the three carrier-based front-line units.

Wider utility An outcome of SDSR 2010, the concept of CEPP goes beyond fast jet Carrier Strike to embrace the

Top: The Merlin CROWSNEST will provide ASaC capability to the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. Above: Royal Navy Merlin HM Mk.2 helicopters protect HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales from surface and underwater threats.

wider utility of the QEC carriers as mobile joint air operating platforms with the ability to embark a rotary-wing air group of at least 40 aircraft. This reflects the inherent flexibility and adaptability of the two ships to conduct a broad spectrum of tasks, such as humanitarian relief, capacity building, and support to amphibious operations.

Accordingly, QEC offers the potential to operate in support of air manoeuvres in the littoral (near the coastline). It is for this mission that the Commando Helicopter Force will receive the Merlin HC.4/4A helicopter as the long-term replacement for the now-retired Sea King HC.4.

The Merlin HC.4/4A is the ultimate product of the Merlin Life Sustainment Programme (MLSP), under which ex-RAF Merlin HC.3/3A battlefield support

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CROWN COPYRIGHT PHOTOS

Left: As joint operating platforms, the QEC will operate a range of helicopters from sister services such as the Chinook HC.6. Above: A Wildcat HMA Mk.2 of 700(W) Naval Air Squadron conducting flying trials near HMS Monmouth off the South coast of the UK.

helicopters are being re-roled and ‘ship-optimised’ to serve the lift needs of 3 Commando Brigade as part of the Commando Helicopter Force. MLSP is in fact delivering in two phases: The first stage, now complete, has modified seven existing HC.3/3A aircraft for ship operations, including the fitting of folding tails and rotor heads.

Phase 2 – entails some 25 Merlin Mk. 3/3A helicopters – receiving the HC.4/4A designation – to be fully optimised for ship operations, and cleared for ship operations at 15,600 kg maximum all-up weight. This programme, including the conversion of the seven interim Merlins, will bring the legacy HC.3 and HC.3A aircraft up to an almost identical standard, so enabling both aircraft to operate within either of the two front-line squadrons. The first HC.4 Merlin was delivered back to the RN on May 24, 2018. The rest of the 24 aircraft will be delivered by the end of 2020, and all 25 should be fully operational by 2023.

A key part of the MLSP ship optimisation is the introduction of main rotor head fold motors, the associated fold management unit, and the automatic tail fold. Accordingly, the aircraft mission management computer software will be modified to include the head and tail fold capability. The HC.4/4A aircraft will also be fitted with the same cockpit as the Merlin HM Mk.2.

What should not be forgotten is that QEC will be joint operating platforms. In this capacity, the intent is to achieve the appropriate flight deck clearances in order to be able to operate a range of helicopters from the sister services. These include RAF Chinook HC.6 heavy-lifters, and Army Air Corps’ Wildcat AH.1 and Apache AH.1 attack helicopters. Excellent progress has been made already with Chinook trials beginning in February 2018, and the first Apache landing on HMS Queen Elizabeth on June 3, 2019. Royal Navy Wildcats have already operated from HMS Queen Elizabeth during her Westlant 18 trip to the United States in 2018 and continue to do so through Westlant 19.

Operating attack helicopters from a carrier deck is not altogether new: the embarkation and operation of Apaches from HMS Ocean in 2011 in support of Operation Ellamy provided the RN with a first opportunity to project a rotary-wing precision strike capability. It was also the first time that Army Air Corps attack helicopters had operated from a maritime platform in an operational setting; in this instance, it was a more flexible and far lower risk alternative to basing the Apaches on land. Ocean also embarked US Air Force HH-60 Pave Hawk combat search and rescue helicopters during Ellamy. Other helicopters proven from the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth include US Coast Guard MH-60 Jayhawks, Canadian Armed Forces CH-148 Cyclones, and US Marine Corps’ MV-22s and CH-53s, exemplifying the navy’s ability to conduct combined operations with allied nations.

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PORTSMOUTH’S PLACE IN HISTORY Attacked, plundered and razed to the ground by the French, Germans, Romans, Saxons, and even the Vikings, Portsmouth has grown through adversity and necessity into one of the world’s greatest naval ports. Simon Michell explains.

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y the time the Norman Lord Jean de Gisors founded Portsmouth in 1180, Portsea island, on which it stands, had been regularly ransacked and occupied by a succession of brutal invaders – first Romans, next Saxons, then Danes. Although the Romans built Portchester Castle on the mainland to defend that coastline, the advantages of Portsea’s more strategic location eventually became apparent. None other than Alfred the Great stationed ships in the waters off Portsea and used the nearby Solent as a massing point for his squadrons in his crucial victory over the Danes in 897.

Richard the Lionheart

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Tudor transformation To guard against these continual attacks, bit by bit, additional fortifications were erected to protect the port.

Most notably, the Round Tower at the entrance to the harbour was built by the Lancastrian King Henry V in 1417. However, it was the Tudors who were responsible for transforming the port and the dockyard at Portsmouth into a formidable

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It was the Plantagenets in the 12th and 13th centuries who really understood the military significance of Portsmouth as a naval hub and a key line of communications between England and France. Richard the Lionheart recognised the need for a defendable harbour to ensure safe passage to and from his other territories on the Continent. In gratitude for this service, he granted Portsmouth its earliest charter in 1194, enabling the town to hold a two-week fair, as well as a healthy tax exemption. His brother, the notorious King John, also understood its importance, and consequently granted Portsmouth permanent naval status. Under his reign, a dockyard was established in 1212. From then on, not only could ships moor up at Portsmouth, they could also be serviced and built there too. In order to defend the expanding base, King John decreed a protective wall to be built around the yard, beginning a process of extension and enhancement that would continue right up to the present day.

Over the following century, Portsmouth enjoyed relative tranquillity. However, that was brought to an abrupt end with the protracted 14th century conflict between England and France. In the run-up to, and during, the 100 Years War, French forces attacked Portsmouth, burning it to the ground no fewer than seven times between 1327 and 1380.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO BY LPHOT WILL HAIG, CROWN COPYRIGHT

and technologically superior military base. In 1495, Henry VII paid a little more than £190 for the world’s first ever dry dock to be built on the site, irreversibly changing the way ships would be built, rebuilt, and repaired. This was just the first of many innovations that Portsmouth would introduce. The ill-fated flagship the Mary Rose, for example, was built at Portsmouth, and was the first ship to have gun ports put in the side of the hull. Contrary to popular belief, she served in Henry VIII’s navy for more than 30 years, seeing action in three wars against the French and the Scots before sinking in 1545 at the Battle of the Solent.

Portsmouth and the Parliamentarians Portsmouth remained a preeminent English naval port, but gradually declined in relative importance as a shipbuilding centre with the emergence of new docks in London. The navy, on the other hand, began to assume ever greater significance. During

Opposite page: Richard I of England. Above: Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, was retired to Portsmouth harbour in 1812 and moved to the dry dock in 1922.

Oliver Cromwell’s stewardship of the commonwealth it doubled in size. Having dismissed the entire navy administration, which he considered inept and corrupt, Cromwell appointed the gifted and reliable Col William Willoughby as the port’s first Admiralty Commissioner in 1649. Whilst the navy was being strengthened to take on Dutch dominance of the seas, the port was extended and further fortified. Under Cromwell, it served as a base for the first Anglo-Dutch War in 1652 and the Anglo-Spanish War of 1654. This enlargement and fortification work was taken further by the founder of the Royal Navy, Charles II, following the restoration of the monarchy, and by 1685 Portsmouth

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Left: The Round Tower, Portsmouth Harbor. Above: HMS Dreadnought underway, circa 1906-07.

had become the most fortified naval port in the world. By 1722, Portsmouth became the largest dockyard in the newly established United Kingdom.

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO

Industrial heyday The converging advent of the Industrial Revolution, the rapid growth of the British empire, and the threat of invasion by Napoleon brought one of the busiest ever eras to the port. Not only was there a steady stream of ships launched from the yards, but naval accessories, including barrels and beer, were also churned out in huge volumes. In fact, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s father, Marc, masterminded the world’s first all-metal steam-powered mass production line for the millions of wooden blocks used in ships’ rigging. Once in service, the Block Mills furnished the Royal Navy with more than 130,000 blocks a year. Manufacturing at the dockyard expanded to meet the growing demands of the navy, becoming the most industrialised site in the world in 1850, with 8,000 workers on the payroll.

U.S. NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER

The modern era A new threat to the dockyard emerged in the 20th century – that of aerial bombardment. During the night of Sept. 16, 1916, Zeppelin L31, commanded by Heinrich Mathy, dropped four bombs on the port, narrowly missing HMS Victory. Although there was little damage to the port or any ships the raid served notice on a far greater threat to follow. The Blitz attacks on Portsmouth during

World War II were far more devastating. Here the Tudors were to play one last part in the defence of the port: The Round tower built by Henry VII in the 15th century was repurposed to become an air raid observation post.

Following World War II, Portsmouth was repaired and played a key role during the Cold War. It has enjoyed mixed fortunes, with shipbuilding ceasing in 2013. However, the famous dockyard is now ready to take her place in the next phase of her proud history as home port to the two Queen Elizabethclass aircraft carriers. Once again, the infrastructure has been reconfigured, with a brand-new jetty, power supply, a freshly dredged channel, and mammoth navigation lights to guide the two carriers through the narrow entrance to the harbour and preserve Portsmouth’s reputation for at least another 50 years as a world-class naval port.

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PORTSMOUTH HISTORIC DOCKYARD When HMS Prince of Wales joins her sister ship at Portsmouth, she will be in some very illustrious company. Ian Goold looks at some of the historic ships already at Portsmouth.

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s HMS Prince of Wales enters Her Majesty’s Naval Base Portsmouth following sea trials, she will berth for the first time at the home port from which she will deploy over the next five decades.

That affords the prospect of a half-century’s service set in the context of a very much longer maritime story preserved in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. The base has been an integral part of Portsmouth city for more than 820 years, more than 500 of which are represented by four grand old ladies waiting to greet HMS Prince of Wales: Mary Rose, HMS Victory, HMS Warrior, and HMS M.33.

Built in 1510, and the only 16th-century warship on display, King Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose is preserved in a museum that captures the moment she sank in the Solent in 1545. Her story covers 30 years of British battles against the French, her re-discovery in 1971, her subsequent resurrection from the seabed in 1982, and her conservation by the Mary Rose Trust.

Mary Rose is displayed in a £27-million museum in No. 3 Dock, where floor-to-ceiling glazing on the lower and main decks enables visitors to view the Tudor vessel. Almost 20,000 artefacts, including many weapons (from longbows to two-tonne guns) and personal effects (leather footwear, musical instruments, nit combs, and wooden bowls), provide a unique insight into the ship and the lives of her crew.

In the 1512-14 First French War, Mary Rose had taken part in the Battle of Saint-Mathieu. Between

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PHOTOS BY MEGAN MICHELL

Mary Rose

Above: Henry VIII’s flagship, Mary Rose, saw action against the French before sinking in the Battle of the Solent in 1545.

BARRY SWAINSBURY – FLEET PHOTOGRAPHER CROWN COPYRIGHT

Left: Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship during the Battle of Trafalgar, Victory, is preserved at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and visited by 400,000 people every year. Below: HMS Warrior was Britain’s first iron-hulled ship, and as such, the pride of Queen Victoria’s Royal Navy fleet.

into dry dock at Portsmouth. Annually, 400,000 people visit her to see the spot – marked by a brass plaque on the quarterdeck – where Nelson fell.

The ship is undergoing a 13-year, £35-million conservation programme to repair and maintain her structure and improve the system of supports within her dry dock, overseen by conservation, engineering, heritage, rigging, shipbuilding, and timber-preservation experts. This work has included a £2-million conservation project in 2013-14 for routine maintenance, painting, surveys, and a thorough overhaul of the ship’s boats.

1522 and 1536, when she was held in reserve, the ship was re-caulked and refitted. Reports of the circumstances that preceded her sinking at the Battle of the Solent are conflicting, but it is clear that many hundreds of sailors died when Mary Rose sank. Early attempts to raise her were abandoned and she remained undisturbed until divers discovered the vessel in 1836.

PHOTO BY RENNETT STOWE VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

HMS Victory Some 250 years younger than Mary Rose, HMS Victory is the Royal Navy’s most famous warship, best known for her part in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. She currently serves as the flagship of the First Sea Lord and as a living museum to the Georgian Navy at the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

From 1778 to 1812, HMS Victory participated in five naval battles: the First and Second Battles of Ushant, the Battle of Cape Spartel, the Battle of Cape St Vincent (where she was Admiral John Jervis’s flagship), and finally, against a combined Franco/Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, where she suffered the highest British casualties with 51 of the 800+ crew killed aboard, including Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was shot at the height of the battle and died after receiving news of victory, as well as a further 11 seamen who later died of their wounds.

A national appeal saved Victory for posterity some 97 years ago, after which she was placed

HMS Warrior The world’s fastest, largest, most powerful warship when launched in 1860, the steam- and sail-powered HMS Warrior never fired a shot in anger. Rather, her reputation and obvious supremacy intimidated enemy fleets and deterred them from attacking.

HMS Warrior was the pride of Queen Victoria’s fleet, Britain’s first iron-hulled, armoured warship sporting iron sides for protection against exploding shells and large guns – a combination that changed naval warfare. The Royal Navy had been

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VolkerStevin is proud to have played a central role in the delivery of critical infrastructure to support the Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers at Portsmouth.

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Read more at www.wartsila.com/navy Finding what you really need is only possible when you have the best marine offering on earth to choose from. Wärtsilä is the market leader in improving efficiency, electrical and automation solutions for naval vessels of all types. The Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers are the largest all electric naval vessels in the world and Wärtsilä will provide the backbone of the on-board power generation including the diesel generating power (40MW out of a total of 100MW) = 2 x 16V38 DG Sets (11,000 kW/each), 2 x 12V38 DG sets (9,000kW/each) and 1 x 12V200 emergency genset (2MW).

PHOTOS BY MEGAN MICHELL

determined to design an invincible ship, and her armament, size, and speed had a profound effect on naval architecture.

Nevertheless, Warrior’s warship career was shortlived: within a few years she was obsolete, replaced by faster designs with bigger guns and thicker armour. By 1871, she was downgraded to coastguard and reserve services, put up for sale as scrap in 1924, then converted into a floating oil pontoon at Pembroke Dock. After the oil depot closed in 1978, Warrior became the world’s largest-ever maritime-restoration project under the Maritime Trust before returning in 1987 to Portsmouth Harbour, where she now occupies a gateway position as a ship museum and monument.

In 2017, she came under new ownership on April 1 following the Warrior Preservation Trust’s merger with the National Museum of the Royal Navy, which owns HMS Victory and First World War monitor, HMS M.33. The completion of a £4.2-million upper-deck conservation programme was celebrated on July 12, 2019, when the ship was presented as she was during the Round-Britain tour of 1863, and now even more of this historic warship is open for visitors to explore.

HMS M.33 Youngest of the four maritime ladies welcoming HMS Prince of Wales to Portsmouth is HMS M.33,

One of only three British surviving warships from World War I, the floating gun platform HMS M.33 saw action at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915.

the sole British survivor of the 1915-16 Dardanelles Campaign (and Russian Civil War that followed).

M.33 is one of just three existing British World War I warships. She was a floating gun platform, whose first operation was at the Battle of Gallipoli in August 1915, the year in which her keel was laid down. Her shallow draft permitted her to approach close inshore and fire her two powerful six-inch guns. The rest of the war was spent in the Mediterranean, where M.33 was involved in seizure of the Greek fleet at Salamis Bay in 1916.

Before returning to Portsmouth to become a mine-laying training ship (renamed HMS Minerva), she had been sent to Murmansk in Russia after the war to relieve the North Russian Expeditionary Force. World War II saw the vessel serving as a floating staff office; after her boilers and engines were removed she was converted to a boom defence workshop and later served as a floating workshop at Royal Clarence Yard in Gosport.

Since 1997, M.33 has sat beside HMS Victory in No.1 Dock in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, where she was part of the Great War at Sea 1914-1918 programme, and where she was opened in 2015 in time for her centenary to be celebrated.

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SEVEN SISTERS

HMS Prince of Wales Through the Ages From 1765 to the present day, seven Royal Navy ships have been named after the Prince of Wales. Charles Oldham tells the tale of the six ships that preceded the most powerful of them all – the current aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales (R09). here have been a number of ships named Prince of Wales, stretching back to the 18th century, but the legacy of Royal Navy (RN) men of war bearing the name begins with a 74-gun third-rate ship of the line launched in 1765.

This HMS Prince of Wales, broken up in 1783, was the first of six RN warships to bear the name. The second Prince of Wales was launched in 1794, a 90-gun second-rate ship of the line that served as Admiral Robert Calder’s flagship at the Battle of Cape Finisterre in 1805. The third Prince of Wales was a 38-gun transport purchased in 1795 and still in commission in 1801. The next was a product of the age of steam, one of a class of six screw-propelled, 121-gun three-deck, firstrate ships of the line. She was renamed Britannia in 1869, becoming a cadet training ship at Dartmouth after her engines were removed. She was broken up in 1916.

The first battleship HMS Prince of Wales was a 14,140-tonne Formidable-class pre-dreadnought commissioned in May 1904. Her armament included two twin 12-inch gun turrets, 12 6-inch guns, four torpedo tubes, and 16 12-pounder guns. She served throughout World War I, from the English Channel to the Dardanelles and the Adriatic, but as a pre-Dreadnought, she soon became obsolete and was decommissioned before being sold for scrap in 1919.

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The hunt for Bismarck The most well-known ship to sail under the name HMS Prince of Wales was the King George V-class battleship. Her short and eventful life spanned the world’s oceans and some of the most famous naval engagements of all time. Commissioned on Jan. 19, 1941, HMS Prince of Wales displaced 44,500 tonnes fully loaded, and was armed with 10 14-inch guns; eight of them in two quadruple turrets, and two more in a twin turret. In addition, she was equipped with 16 5.25-inch

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dual-purpose guns and 32 2-pounders. Her completion had been rushed due to the urgencies of war, and she was hurried into battle when the RN realised that the German battleship Bismarck had sortied with orders to destroy British merchant shipping convoys.

Having just completed builder’s trials and still far from being fully worked up, HMS Prince of Wales departed in company with the battlecruiser HMS Hood on May 22, 1941, to search for the Bismarck and her consort, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. She was so new that civilian contractors were still aboard correcting defects discovered during builder’s trials.

In the early morning hours of May 24, 1941, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Hood intercepted the German task force. At a tactical disadvantage because of their angle of approach, and with the vulnerable Hood with her thin deck armour in the lead, disaster struck only 10 minutes into the battle. Plunging fire from the Bismarck’s 15-inch guns pierced the Hood’s armour and apparently detonated her aft 4-inch and 15-inch magazines. The battlecruiser broke in two and both halves of the ship quickly sank in the frigid waters. There were only three survivors. HMS Prince of Wales now found herself under fire from both Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. She took seven heavy shell hits, but in turn struck a blow that would prove the undoing of Bismarck.

Commander of the German operation, Admiral Günther

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British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on board Prince of Wales during his journey to North America to meet with President Roosevelt. The four 14inch guns of Y turret are visible in the background.

Lütjens, had inexplicably neglected three opportunities to top off the battleship’s fuel bunkers before her sortie into the Atlantic. Now, 14-inch shells from HMS Prince of Wales ruptured fuel tanks aboard the German battleship, and damaged boiler and turbo-generator rooms. She began to leave a trail of oil, but even worse, could no longer access the 1,000 tons of fuel in her forward tanks, which had either become unreachable due to damage or contaminated by salt water. Not only had HMS Prince of Wales ended Bismarck’s mission to raid British convoys, but by depriving her of fuel, had left the admiral only one option: to make for a

French port for repairs. HMS Prince of Wales then shadowed Bismarck, along with RN cruisers and destroyers, until other RN forces could close in.

While HMS Prince of Wales had to break off the action in order to refuel and repair her damage, she had done her job. Bismarck was engaged and destroyed while fleeing for the French coast.

Hosting Winston Churchill After being repaired at Rosyth, HMS Prince of Wales played another important role in carrying Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Argentia,

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WINGS

Keeping the Nation’s historic Naval aircraft flying navywings.org.uk Registered Charity

NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM PHOTO

Above: HMS Prince of Wales photographed in 1941, sometime prior to her May 24, 1941 engagement with the German battleship Bismarck. She is lowering a Supermarine Walrus amphibian aircraft over the side. Right: President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill seated on the quarterdeck of HMS Prince of Wales for a Sunday service during the Atlantic Conference, Aug. 10, 1941.

Newfoundland, to meet with American President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1941. The end result of the meeting was the Atlantic Charter, which defined the Allied goals for the postwar world, and became the basis for the modern United Nations.

The next month, HMS Prince of Wales was in the Mediterranean during Operation Halberd, escorting a vital convoy to Malta to resupply the besieged island, and shooting down several attacking Italian aircraft on the way.

In late October, she was dispatched to the Far East as a deterrent against the Japanese. She was to have formed Force Z with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse and aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable, but Indomitable ran aground off Jamaica, and therefore Prince of Wales and Repulse had to proceed without air cover. The two arrived in Singapore on December 2 and were tied up in the harbour when

word came of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Force Z sortied on December 8, initially to attack Japanese transports off Kota Bharu. However, they were later ordered to proceed to Kuantan. Without HMS Indomitable’s defensive shield of aircraft, the capital ships were terribly exposed to attack, and on the morning of December 10, long-range Japanese bombers armed with bombs and torpedoes attacked in several waves. Within two hours, both warships were lost, becoming the first two capital ships sunk by air attack on the open ocean, and a sad epitaph to the age of the battleship. The future would now belong to aircraft carriers.

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THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE ROYAL NAVY SALUTES THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Nick Hewitt, head of exhibitions and collections at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, celebrates the museum’s 10th anniversary with a rundown of some of the Royal Navy’s most historic warships.

he arrival and commissioning of HMS Prince of Wales, the Royal Navy’s (RN’s) second 65,000-tonne, state-of-the-art carrier, cements Portsmouth’s centuries-old status as the home of cutting-edge naval technology.

Indeed, the RN’s first submarines were based here from 1902, and the first, Holland 1, is on display at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, part of The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN). What’s more, in 1906, Portsmouth Royal Dockyard built the revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought, in less than a year.

Curiously, 1906 was also almost the last time an RN ship named Prince of Wales entered the Naval Base, when the pre-dreadnought battleship, which was the fifth ship to bear the name, came in for refit. Her successor, the celebrated World War II (WW II) battleship, in many ways the pinnacle of the superdreadnought, never came to Portsmouth during her short but eventful service life. This sixth Prince of Wales, pennant number 53, was commissioned in January 1941, with WW II at its height. She, too, represented cuttingedge technology for her day, being a magnificent compromise of armour, gun power and speed designed to keep within the stringent limitations of the Washington and London Naval Treaties, unlike her ‘treaty-busting’ rivals being constructed in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

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However, Prince of Wales did not enjoy the luxury of a lengthy acceptance process. She was bombed whilst still being fitted out, many key machinery tests were rushed or postponed, and in May 1941 she found herself in action against the German battleship Bismarck with a team of Vickers-Armstrong technicians on board to nurse her experimental quadruple 14-inch gun turrets.

Hapless Force Z After acquitting herself admirably against Bismarck, in August Prince of Wales went on to carry Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, where he met US President Franklin Roosevelt and the two leaders proclaimed the Atlantic Charter. Ominously, at the end of the year she was sent out to Singapore with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse as flagship of ‘Force Z’, an ill-fated ‘fleet in being’ intended to deter Japanese aggression. On Dec. 10, 1941, whilst searching for a Japanese invasion force making for Malaya, the two ships were attacked and sunk by Japanese aircraft with the loss of 840 lives.

The incontrovertible fact was that by 1941 even the most modern battleships, whilst still useful, had been superseded by aircraft carriers as the pre-eminent capital ships for any modern navy.

In fact, one of the RN’s new armoured carriers,

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HMS Indomitable (92), was supposed to join Force Z, but she was damaged when she ran aground in the Caribbean and the force sailed without air cover. We will never know whether Indomitable would have saved Force Z, but it is beyond doubt that her aircraft would have made a difference.

Her Hurricane and Martlet fighters would have been instrumental in protecting the fleet, and her Albacore torpedo bombers would have given Force Z a crucial over-the-horizon strike capability.

The RN was perfectly aware of the importance of carrier aviation, as the service had been at the forefront of developing this new technology since World War I. The RN operated the first true carrier, HMS Argus (I49), converted from an Italian ocean liner, a truly revolutionary design with many of the

HMS Indomitable in convoy, with Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers and Grumman Martlet fighters ready for action.

features which still define a modern aircraft carrier, including a fully enclosed hangar, a full-length flight deck, aircraft lifts, rudimentary but effective fire-prevention systems, and a crude but workable arrester system. Her air wing included Sopwith T.1 Cuckoo torpedo bombers – the first bespoke maritime strike aircraft and the pioneer of folding wings to facilitate easy stowage.

The RN went on to commission HMS Hermes (95), the world’s first ship designed as an aircraft

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Clockwise from left: HMS Argus, late 1918, with her full-length flight deck and the prototype carrier island constructed of wood and canvas. • A Sopwith Cuckoo torpedo bomber, the RN’s first bespoke maritime strike aircraft. • The Grumman Martlet, a carrier-borne fighter aircraft, later known in the RN by its US Navy name of Wildcat. • Also used for spotting and reconnaissance, a Fairey Albacore torpedo bomber with its crew of three. • Full steam ahead: Blackburn Buccaneer S2 of 809 NAS ready for launch from HMS Ark Royal’s steam catapult.

carrier from the keel up, and despite tensions and uncertainty over the procurement of suitable aircraft during the interwar years, the service remained a world leader in carrier strike capability. The RN’s armoured carriers proved astonishingly durable during WW II, standing up to repeated attacks by German and Italian land-based bombers in the Mediterranean and waves of Japanese kamikaze (suicide) aircraft in the Pacific. Although the attrition rate amongst the older ships was high, only one modern carrier, HMS Ark Royal (91) was lost during the war,

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to a submarine attack in the Mediterranean in November 1941.

After the war, RN carrier aviation continued to enjoy a string of technological firsts, including the first steam-powered catapult (1950), the first carrier to be built with an angled deck (1955), the first carriers to be built with ‘ski-jumps’ to support the operation of Harrier VSTOL ‘jump jets’ (1977), and now HM Ships Prince of Wales and Queen Elizabeth, the largest warships ever built for the RN, which are taking carrier aviation technology to the next level in so many ways with innovations

like the introduction of two deck islands to enhance aviation operations.

The City of Portsmouth, its Historic Dockyard and Naval Base, HMS Prince of Wales, and RN carrier aviation have in common extraordinarily long, illustrious and often overlapping histories, and The NMRN is proud to tell these stories across the country. HMS Prince of Wales (53) is commemorated in Portsmouth, where her bell, salvaged in 2002, is on permanent display in the HMS – Hear My Story galleries, which tell the story of the RN in the 20th century. The exciting story of how the RN led the world in the development of carrier aviation is told at the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton, where visitors can also see a full-scale recreation of the flight deck of HMS Ark Royal (R09), the RN’s last big deck carrier, and Europe’s largest and most important collection of naval aircraft.

Top: A bird’s eye view of HMS Hermes, showing her angled deck. Middle: HMS Ark Royal (R09) in heavy seas, with McDonnell Douglas Phantom II aircraft being respotted on the flight deck. A Phantom on the catapult of the Ark Royal, ready for launch, is re-created in the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s Carrier Experience exhibition. Right: HMS Hermes in June 1982, with the ski jump fitted in 1980 for her VSTOL Sea Harrier aircraft.

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Commander Sue Eagles, communications director for the Navy Wings charity, highlights the genius of the STOVL jump-jet concept that led to the F-35B and carrier aviation of the future.

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rom the time the guns fell silent at Trafalgar, few doubted that Britannia ruled the waves, but it was the arrival of the aircraft carrier that was to prove the ‘Queen of the Board’.

These ‘mobile airbases’, able to move at will to strike enemy fleets in their bases; to counter the hated U-boat scourge; and to engage an enemy at ranges hitherto impossible, consigned the ‘era of the big gun’ to just another chapter in the age-old history of the sea.

As HMS Prince of Wales (R09), sister ship to HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08), sails into her home port of Portsmouth to join the fleet, her entry into service with the Royal Navy (RN) firmly re-establishes the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) formidable carrier aviation capability.

The RN pioneered the aircraft carrier during World War I (WWI), and HMS Argus, the first carrier with a full-length flight deck and large compartment below to act as a hangar, was commissioned in 1918. She was designed to launch a torpedo bomber strike against the German High Seas Fleet, and thus take control of the North Sea at one stroke. However, WWI ended before that attack could be carried out.

Nevertheless, the RN continued to develop the concept of Carrier Strike, and during World War II (WW II) executed it with awe-inspiring success at Taranto in 1940 against the Italian Battle Fleet in the Mediterranean.

The vulnerability of battleships to air power was convincingly demonstrated in 1941 with the crippling of the Bismarck by Swordfish aircraft from HMS Ark Royal, and the tragic destruction of the former HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse solely by Japanese air attack. Poignantly, this latter event significantly altered the ship procurement and operational deployment strategies of both the UK and the United States.

RN aircraft carrier innovations After WW II, when it seemed that no carrier could operate the new jet aircraft, the legendary British naval test pilot Capt Eric (Winkle) Brown CBE DSC AFC landed the first jet, a Sea Vampire, on an aircraft carrier (HMS Ocean) in 1945. Over the next decade, the RN produced the three inventions that made modern fast-jet carrier operations possible; the angled deck, the steam catapult, and the mirror landing sight.

The offensive power of the RN’s carrier force proved indispensable in the Pacific, Korea, Suez, and the Cold War; and in the 1970s when it seemed that carriers were too costly, the RN showed that it could still

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take modern aircraft to sea using Invincible-class aircraft carriers and Sea Harriers.

The pure genius of the concept of short take off and vertical landing (STOVL) was at the very pinnacle of British engineering and innovation, and without the Sea Harrier and the ski-jump, another British design, the successful Falklands operation in 1982, and others since, would not have been possible.

No other nation can match this record of technical innovation paralleled by operational success, or has such a distinguished carrier aviation heritage. But what is it about flying from aircraft carriers that has given Britain such a world-leading reputation? HM Ships Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales have been ‘Built by the Nation for the Nation’. At the heart of this great national achievement, however, the technical achievements, test programmes and problem-solving skills of naval aviators and engineers have opened-up previously unimagined possibilities and overcome extraordinary challenges, leading to the development of new advancements and technologies that have changed history. It has been this mindset of analytical thinking, inventiveness and ingenuity that has benefited the evolutionary story profoundly – and remains the hallmark of carrier aviation today.

Find, Fix and Strike While putting aircraft above the fleet to provide defence and protect merchantmen was

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF NAVY WINGS EXCEPT AS NOTED

FLY NAVY

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO LPHOT KYLE HELLER, CROWN COPYRIGHT

a vital role, defence alone was not enough. From its earliest beginnings, the strategic and conceptual philosophy of naval flying has always been ‘Find, Fix and Strike’ as embodied in the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) motto. It was the combined ability to be the eyes and ears of the fleet, to ‘observe’ and ‘locate’, as well as to decisively ‘strike’ with appropriate force that gave carrier aviation the combat-winning edge.

The striking power of naval aircraft developed at such a pace, that later aircraft in the evolutionary story were hardly recognisable beside their forebears of 1939. The birth of the jet age in the 1960s and 70s, and the radical new designs it spawned, saw the top speed of naval fighters rise from a ‘sedate’ 600 mph to a blistering 1,400 mph within a few years.

The first British F-35B Lightnings aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth. The pure genius of short take off and vertical landing (STOVL) was at the very pinnacle of British engineering and innovation, and the inspirational through-life development and achievement of the Sea Harrier directly informed the design requirement for its replacement, leading to the F-35B Lightning.

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Sea Harrier entering service with the FAA, and the inspirational success of the Sea Harrier in the Falklands War directly informed the design requirement for its replacement, leading to what has become the F-35B Lightning II. The Argentinians possessed a landbased air force of more than 200 aircraft and had a significant potential advantage, but the Sea Harrier’s

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Proudly serving the Royal Navy for over 50 years picture courtesy BAE Systems Ltd

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Other SPX FLOW engineered products are extensively used on all types of surface ships from minesweepers, frigates, destroyers and the QE Class aircraft carriers along with conventional and nuclear submarines. Additionally, our heat exchangers, pumps and dehydration equipment can be found on civilian craft and merchant ships world-wide. Visit us at www.spxflow.com for more information on all of our brands.

Preserving the Nation’s Naval Aviation Heritage

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he remarkable story of the nation’s naval aviation heritage and the ground-breaking

endeavours that shaped it, is brought to life by the work of the charity Navy Wings.

The charity restores, maintains and flies an important collection of historic naval aircraft that display to millions of people annually at air shows up and down the country.

Commander (Air) HMS Prince of Wales, Commander Phil Richardson OBE said, ‘We are immensely proud of our heritage and of the work of Navy Wings keeping our historic aircraft flying. The aircraft are a dynamic link with the past, helping younger generations understand the decisive part played by naval aircraft in the history of our nation. They are also an enduring tribute to all those who gave their lives in the service of naval flying, my grandfather, among them’. To find out more about Navy Wings and to become a supporter visit www.navywings.org.uk

Top: 21 Fairey Swordfish biplanes attacked the Italian Battle Fleet at Taranto, ending the era of the big-gun battleship.

Pictured here is Fairey Swordfish II LS326, one of the last remaining Swordfish flying in the world. Above: The Royal Navy’s first aircraft carrier, HMS Argus was launched in December 1917, marking the beginning of more than 100 years of British carrier aviation.

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Left: HMS Eagle was the first carrier to have a purpose-built island on the deck to help with aircraft operations.

Below left: When HMS Ark Royal was decommissioned in 1979, she became the last RN carrier to use catapults and arrester gear. Opposite page: The Royal Navy has once again pioneered Carrier Strike design philosophy with the twin islands of the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers.

STOVL capability enabled the Harrier force to launch and recover in appalling weather and far higher sea states than would have been possible in Phantoms and Buccaneers.

100 years after HMS Argus was commissioned, HM Ships Prince of Wales and Queen Elizabeth not only reflect this unrivalled tradition of pioneering naval engineering, but with their revolutionary F-35B jets, they will be two of the most modern and powerful aircraft carriers in the world, providing the UK with a formidable and highly versatile defence capability to meet the uncertain demands of another century.

Air power remains the predominant medium used to most effectively inflict a decisive blow on an enemy. The challenges and threats faced by our globalised world have never been greater, and it will be carrier-borne aircraft, able to operate at sea for long periods, fully worked-up in the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, that will be critical to the UK and our allies in the decades ahead.

With the arrival of HMS Prince of Wales, the UK can now play her full part, showing again that our arm is long, with fist at the end of it capable of striking with decisive force. With their great mobility and flexibility, Britain’s two aircraft carriers and their embarked aircraft will unequivocally prove that our defence capability will depend as never before on our ability to find, fix and finish whatever threatens us by sea.

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CARRIER CHRONOLOGIES Naval Air Power Evolution

Queen Elizabeth Class

1806: HMS Pallas deploys kites to drop

leaflets on France 1849: Austrian ship Vulcano launches

bomb-laden balloons over Venice 1908: Admiralty orders the Mayfly airship HMA 1 1910: American Eugene Ely becomes first man

to fly an aircraft off a ship 1911: French Navy ship Foudre becomes

first vessel to carry seaplanes 1912: Lt Samson (RN) becomes first Englishman

to fly an aircraft off a ship 1913: HMS Hermes converted into a seaplane

tender by the Royal Navy 1914: Royal Navy commissions first modern

aircraft carrier – HMS Ark Royal 1917: Sqn Cdr Edwin Dunning (RNAS) becomes

first man to land wheeled aircraft on a ship 1918: HMS Argus becomes first full-length flat

deck aircraft carrier 1940: Royal Navy conducts first all-aircraft raid

against ships at Battle of Taranto 1945: Lt Cdr Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown (RN) makes first

jet aircraft landing on ship 1945: Cdr C. C. Mitchel (FAA) invents aircraft

steam catapult system for warships 1951: Lt Cdr Nicholas Goodhart (RN) invents

mirror landing system

1998: British government agrees to replace

Invincible-class aircraft carriers 1999: Design of Queen Elizabeth Class begins 2003: Original Aircraft Carrier Team formed 2005: Aircraft Carrier Alliance formed 2008: Contract to build Queen Elizabeth Class signed 2009: First steel cut by HRH Princess Anne 2014: HMS Queen Elizabeth launched at Rosyth 2014: Assembly of HMS Prince of Wales begins 2015: Second MT30 gas turbine successfully

fitted on HMS Prince of Wales 2016: Final section of HMS Prince of Wales is

lowered into place by HRH Prince of Wales 2017: HMS Queen Elizabeth enters homeport

of Portsmouth for the first time 2017: HMS Prince of Wales floats out of dry

dock at Rosyth 2018: First F-35B lands on HMS Queen Elizabeth 2018: Main gas turbines are started on HMS Prince of Wales 2019: HMS Prince of Wales undergoes sea trials

before first entry into Portsmouth

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FROM TARANTO TO THE FALKLAND ISLANDS Mark Daly reviews two of the most famous British aircraft carrier actions: the Falklands War and the Battle of Taranto.

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oyal Navy (RN) aircraft carriers have been constantly active since the end of World War II. In the Korean conflict of 1950 to 1953, RN aircraft carriers Glory, Ocean, Theseus, and Triumph mounted 23,000 aircraft sorties. In 1956, five carriers were deployed in the controversial Suez campaign. This was followed by carrier deployments off Oman in 1958, and Kuwait in 1961, and further deployments during the Indonesian confrontation (1963 to 1966). There were also operations off Africa in 1964 and 1966.

However, long after the ending of Britain’s colonial attachments have ceased, Royal Navy carrier operations have continued, often as part of the NATO Alliance, in the Adriatic for operations over Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s, and later for deploying helicopters to Sierra Leone in 2000. They were also used to support forces in Afghanistan, enforce a no-fly zone over southern Iraq and prosecute an amphibious assault on the Iraqi Al Faw peninsula in 2003.

The Falklands War Few imagined that Royal Navy carriers would ever be engaged in intensive warfare in the South Atlantic, but that is what happened after the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentina on April 2, 1982.

Just three days later, two very different aircraft carriers departed Portsmouth naval base: HMS Hermes, a converted Centaur-class

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of 28,000 tonnes dating from 1959, and the modern light carrier HMS Invincible of 19,000 tonnes. They steamed south with a task force of surface warships.

HMS Hermes was the flagship for the force and had embarked an air group of 12 Sea Harriers from 800 and 809 Squadrons, Sea King HAS.5 helicopters from 826 Squadron, and ‘A’ Company 40 Commando Royal Marines.

HMS Invincible’s air group was initially eight, later 10, Sea Harriers of 801 and 809 Squadrons and Sea King HAS.5s of 820 Squadron.

The Falkland Islands, 8,100 nautical miles (nm) from the

COURTESY OF FLYNAVY HERITAGE TRUST

Royal Navy Sea Harrier FRS.1s and RAF Harrier GR.3s aboard HMS Hermes in the South Atlantic. While few in numbers, the V/STOL jets performed superbly.

United Kingdom, are just 400nm off the coast of Argentina, from where aircraft could be constantly dispatched to attack the task force.

The main role for the carriers was, therefore, to establish air superiority to enable a landing force to be disembarked, and to diminish the capabilities of the Argentinian occupying forces.

HMS Hermes made its first move on May 1, launching 12 Sea Harriers to attack Argentinianheld airfields at Stanley and Goose Green. For six weeks until mid-June 1982, an intensive campaign was fought, with Hermes and Invincible positioned with a screen of escorting warships to the east of the Falkland Islands. The two

carriers launched Combat Air Patrols with Sea Harriers, amounting to more than 1,100 sorties.

The Sea Harrier squadrons were reinforced with more aircraft and later joined by 10 RAF Harriers based on HMS Hermes, and together these mounted more than 200 ground attack missions.

At the same time, anti-submarine patrols were constantly maintained by the Sea Kings, and special forces parties were inserted onshore.

It was a hard-fought campaign, with four British warships, including the destroyers HMS Sheffield and HMS Coventry, sunk by air attacks. As the ships transporting the Amphibious Task Group of British Army and Royal Marines units started to

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RAF AIR HISTORICAL BRANCH, CROWN COPYRIGHT CREDIT

assemble in San Carlos Water between East and West Falkland, the attacks by waves of Argentine aircraft intensified. Between the landing of forces, which started on May 21, and the Argentine surrender on June 14 a fierce air war continued.

Sea Harrier fighters from the two carriers were credited with the destruction of 20 attacking Argentinian aircraft.

It was the first time that vertical/short take off and landing (V/STOL) fighters had been operationally flown from ships in combat. HMS Hermes

ROYAL NAVY PHOTO, CROWN COPYRIGHT

Left: RAF Harrier GR.3s and Royal Navy Sea Harrier FRS.1s in the deck park aboard HMS Hermes on May 19, 1982, when RAF 1 Squadron joined with the carrier. The RAF Harriers carried out ground attack sorties alongside the Sea Harriers that flew air superiority, ground attack, and other missions. It was a foreshadowing of Joint Force Harrier and the RAF and RN squadrons that will fly from the Queen Elizabethclass aircraft carriers. Below: HMS Invincible returns to massive celebrations following the Falklands War in 1982. Lined up on deck are Sea King helicopters and Sea Harrier FRS.1 aircraft.

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Above: The Italian battleship Littorio with her bows completely underwater after being run aground to avoid sinking. Littorio was hit by three torpedoes dropped by Royal Navy Swordfish during a nighttime attack that put three Italian battleships out of action. Right: A Royal Navy Fairey Swordfish drops a torpedo during training in 1939.

had served with distinction as task force headquarters, and HMS Invincible, which had only completed her trials shortly before the deployment, was to spend 166 days continuously at sea without putting into harbour. The Falklands campaign did much to revalidate the power of the aircraft carrier as the key component of expeditionary warfare. With V/STOL fighters launching from ski-jumpequipped decks, it continued the Royal Navy tradition of introducing new technology for operating aircraft at sea.

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HMS Triumph off the Philippines in March 1950. She would be one of the first ships to respond when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950. In conjunction with the US Navy aircraft carrier Valley Forge, Triumph would launch the first air strikes of the Korean War.

The RN and the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) have also been responsible for pioneering many of the original concepts of carrier operation, the most famous example dating to World War II. The first time that warships in a defended homeport were attacked by a force of strike aircraft launched from a carrier was the attack from HMS Illustrious on the Italian naval base at Taranto on Nov. 11, 1940. Taranto, on the southeast coast of Italy, was home port to a concentration of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers – posing a constant threat to Allied convoys crossing the Mediterranean to North Africa and Malta.

In order to disguise the forthcoming raid, a series of distinct movements was made by warships and merchant vessels to give the impression that standard convoy protection duties were being performed. Under this cover, HMS Illustrious launched a force of 21 Fairey Swordfish aircraft drawn from 813, 815, 819 and 824 Squadrons at 180nm range.

Approaching Taranto at night in two waves, the Swordfish attacked with torpedoes and bombs after dropping flares to silhouette their targets.

In the shallow waters of

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Battle of Taranto

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A rocket-armed Sea Fury FB.II is catapulted from HMS Glory during Korean War operations in 1951. The Korean War saw more than 23,000 aircraft sorties launched from Royal Navy aircraft carriers.

U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND PHOTO

the enclosed harbour at Taranto, torpedo attacks were believed to be impossible, as weapons dropped from aircraft dive deeply, but a technique had been developed to allow Swordfish aircraft to launch the Mark XII aerial torpedo in a flat attitude at low level.

Despite fierce anti-aircraft fire from hundreds of guns, a shield of barrage balloons, and anti-torpedo nets, 11 torpedoes were launched, sinking one battleship and heavily damaging two others while several cruisers and destroyers were damaged by bombs.

Taranto was no longer a viable major base, and the Italian navy was forced to redeploy its ships to Naples, a shift of power in the Mediterranean.

Royal Navy aircraft carriers went on to fight in a range of actions from the Atlantic to the Pacific – against the German battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz, from escort carriers on convoy protection, in Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and southern France, in the Aegean, and, toward the end of the war, in operations against Japan as part of the British Pacific Fleet.