In terms of the US capability in the Littoral and what they could do to improve it, can someone confirm that what their mine clearing capability is these days ? I seem to recall reading somewhere that it had been significantly scaled back and may actually be less than that of the RN ? If a country was defending a likely littoral sea combat zone, mines would surely still feature.

Nocutsto RAF. Well in real terms it might be out of date well within the aircrafts service life as they wouldn’t start flying from the CVF’s until 2016 anyway. By then the F35 will have been flying 10 years and the F18 SH maiden flight 25 years previously 🙁 I am not sure that anyone who buys a fighter at the end of its production run gets true value for money…………….

I bet he keeps a copy of the Daily Mails second or third photo on his mantlepiece for posterity 😮

Perhaps someone here will ask the question at Farnborough and come back to this thread with the response ?

Yes, I suspect the technical problems of operating a UAV for AEW of of a CVF would be significant. However, there is an opportunity here for BAE to at least start thinking about this sort of stuff. Time will tell.

I thought the programme was rather good given the limitations on subject matter and what they could and could not film. I loved the last few minutes when they oh so carefully shepherded Astute out to sea using 4 very large tugs and about three smaller ones.

There wasn’t too much blurring out of things that they didn’t want you to see, but interestingly one major one was when a shot included a cross section of a slice of the pressure hull where they clearly didn’t want us to see how thick it was. Plus you never got to see the propulsor up close for real, only computer simulations of it (no doubt deliberately inaccurate) which I guess was inevitable

There was also scant mention of the design issues from a few years ago that nearly bought it all to a halt.

A pretty good effort by the BBC I thought. Definately worth a look on the iplayer if you are in the UK and missed it.

Don’t the SAS already fly a couple of unique types in communication roles ? I seem to remember the Dauphin is one and the other something supposedly civilian and hence discrete ? Or has that now changed ?

I seem to recall that there were reports of an indiginous medium/long range cruise missile being developed by Israel 7 or 8 years ago (not the delilah). Were these ever confirmed ? Such a weapon would increase their options significantly if it could be fielded in some numbers.