A highlight of Exercise Trident Fury will be the sinking of former HMCS Huron in a live fire missile exercise in the West Coast Firing Area, about 100 kilometres off the coast of Vancouver Island in 2,000 metres of water by May 18th. This will be the first operational sinking of a Canadian ship in Canadian waters.
The Tribal-Class destroyer was paid off March 30, 2005, after 34 years of service. Past warships that have come to the end of their service life have been sold for scrap or sunk as artificial reefs.
However, given the operational tempo of the navy in recent years, it has been determined that using Huron’s hulk as a target during a large-scale naval exercise would provide realistic and invaluable operational training for sailors as they prepare to face present day challenges.
By: Arabella-Cox - 11th May 2007 at 01:56
It’s always important to give the maximum amout of training to any defence personal that can be provided, these days with the global threat of terrorism mounting (Hezbollah’s attack on the IDF/N’s Ellat class vessel not long ago proving my point here).
It’s good to have a live fire excercise where you can actually bang something up. We do it every now and then down here, if we don’t have a vessel spare (the last one was the former HMAS Swan), then we buy one from the vast USN stocks (like the Belknap class we sunk a couple of years ago) or we sink Drug ships like the Pong Su from North Korea (what a birthday present that was for me last year hehehehehe).
It’s also a way of testing both weapons intergration and human intergration of systems to see if there is any improvments needed on your training sylabus. Sure the target doesn’t act the same as one that would if it were manned but the training is valuable none the less. Good on Canada for keeping up the standards!
Like they say nothing like the real thing?:D
By: Ja Worsley - 10th May 2007 at 23:07
It’s always important to give the maximum amout of training to any defence personal that can be provided, these days with the global threat of terrorism mounting (Hezbollah’s attack on the IDF/N’s Ellat class vessel not long ago proving my point here).
It’s good to have a live fire excercise where you can actually bang something up. We do it every now and then down here, if we don’t have a vessel spare (the last one was the former HMAS Swan), then we buy one from the vast USN stocks (like the Belknap class we sunk a couple of years ago) or we sink Drug ships like the Pong Su from North Korea (what a birthday present that was for me last year hehehehehe).
It’s also a way of testing both weapons intergration and human intergration of systems to see if there is any improvments needed on your training sylabus. Sure the target doesn’t act the same as one that would if it were manned but the training is valuable none the less. Good on Canada for keeping up the standards!
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May 8, 2007 at 1:54 pm