The Kremlin took aim this week at the new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth which has been built for the Royal Navy. “The British aircraft carrier is just a convenient oversized target at sea . For that reason, it is in the interests of the British royal navy not to show off the ‘beauty’ of its aircraft carrier on the high seas any closer than a few hundred miles to its Russian ‘distant relative’ (the Russian aircraft carrier).” The Queen Elizabeth left Rosyth earlier this week to start sea-trials. Apart from the Russian attack rather unusually the Royal Navy kept the whole event rather low key. After fighting to keep the Queen Elizabeth clear of savage defence cuts for many years the Royal Navy decided that its biggest ever warship should just put to sea with little pomp or ceremony. Now, granted there will be a christening ceremony and of course an enormous party is planned when she sails into her home port of Portsmouth next year. But still, it was a low key event. Now, the Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship Prince of Wales are not popular. They have costs many billions of pounds and some say they are far too big for modern-day warfare. Now obviously this is not the case. All of the leading naval powers have aircraft carriers and the Queen Elizabeth is “small” compared to her U.S. counterparts. The problem is that the Queen Elizabeth still doesn’t have any aircraft...in other words she has no “teeth.” The U.S. made F35 jets are still in the production stage and it will be at least two or even three years before the Queen Elizabeth is fully operational. This will mean that her planning, construction and sea-trials have taken almost fifteen years. The wait is now almost over the Royal Navy but with more defence cuts on the horizon I doubt that the carrier will ever have her full compliment of aircraft. But having said all that the Royal Navy and British ship-building deserve praise for the carrier.
Flying high
03/07/2017 00:00
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5 comments
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Putin's right - it's a nice big target and once even part of it is disabled it becomes a crippled beast. The future surely lies in small fast deadly craft with anti-detection shape, each with a VTOL facility and a specially designed supersonic flying unit to use it. All your eggs in one big basket is a recipe for disaster.
Putin's right - it's a nice big target and once even part of it is disabled it becomes a crippled beast. The future surely lies in small fast deadly craft with anti-detection shape, each with a VTOL facility and a specially designed supersonic flying unit to use it. All your eggs in one big basket is a recipe for disaster.
Opposition Leader Mr. Corbyn , wants to scrap the Trident Nuclear Deterrent . Should the Labour party obtain power, then the Aircraft Carriers and their weaponry, would become part of the main deterrent.for Great Britain.
Is our beloved editor ever going to explain why there are no comment sections on the other news items?
Given that the new aircraft carriers won't have any aircraft for several years,they are totally pointless and the money could have been better spent on the army or the R.A.F.. Even well-armed and protected aircraft carriers can be sunk,as the Japanese found out in the Coral Sees.