pjhydroA quick Defence of Hendon
Its not perfect, yes its lightung is “atmospheric”, its care worn certainly, its been better in the past, but as an inhabitant of the capital I can on a whim jump on the tube, stroll in and see close up some of the most interesting airframes to have graced UK skies, drink a coffee while I contemplate how b***dy weird the beldevere really was, enjoy the fading ‘tween war architecture and generally lose myself in a bit of an aviation haze and still be home in time to bath the kids and cook dinner. For London based aviation fans its our little piece of imperfect heaven. I would love to see improvements or course, but don’t knock it too much.
pjhydroThey could take the coffee bar out of Hendon’s display area and stop treating the place as a drop-off centre for bored mothers. Come to think of it, they could stop trying to promote the place as an entertainment/activity centre for kids and then there wouldn’t be quite so many bored children wandering around making a noise and trying to break things. Who knows, maybe they could treat the place as a museum? Just a thought…
Well I take students on school trips there every year, they love it (most of them) and the staff that do the hands on work with them are fantastic. The activity area should be updated IMHO but definately kept, the idea is to get kids interested in aviation, RAF, history, aeronautics etc not bore everyone stupid so men in safari vests can take lots of nice pictures in peace….
I would like to see better theming of exhibits. There could be a nice little Burma Camapaign dispaly for a start….better grouping of training types…..perhaps the RAF Regiment should have a nice dedicated display… some stuff on other trades would be good…..
pjhydroIt is interesting that the serving head of the Navy highlighted the Nimrod as his biggest bone of contention with the review, for my money its the biggest mistake within it.
That said it could be to the benefit of both countries if a shared MPA force was created… after all we share an awful lot of sea space and our respective SAR areas ajoin.
pjhydroInteresting article in the current issue of Sea Breezes on the future of the Navy. Here’s part of it:
Many here are going to shout and scream at that article and I don’t agree with it entirely, but it does raise the questions that have yet to be fully answered and perhaps are more pertinent now than ever –
what is the RN for?
What do we actually want it to do?
What should the UK contribute to global maritime security?
Government, Admirals and the public will give a multitude of answers to those questions and as yet there appears to be no definitive answers, the defence review if anything has left the answers even more elusive.
pjhydroI tend to agree with Nocuts. I think intentions and capability are two sides of the same coin, and influence each other. It is certainly very dangerous to have the intentions without the capability: look at what happened to the British Army in Basra.
Oh undoubtedly, it’s very difficult to rob a bank with a banana! But intention and will do trump capability. You can have the biggest baddest gun in the world but if everyone knows you won’t use it and you don’t appear to be willing to use it then that bank is going to stay unrobbed.
pjhydroIn Rolf Harris stylie “Can you tell what it is yet?”
In fairness I said it was only a fag packet sketch and was about the best I could do in a few minutes with a laptop solely possessing MS Paint as a tools choice!. More concerned about the inexplicable misspelling of the work “arc”. 😀
Hey I meant it, I love quick back of fag packet sketches and that was a top one, point made perfectly.
pjhydroBTW I think intentions trumps capabilities, but I rather live in a world where we had both as having intentions without capabilities gets lots of people killed as you end up in a simple battle of attrition and having capabilities without intentions results in everyone taking advantage of you as they know that you will only respond to a direct attack against your country. I expect in the next decade a situation will arise (likely one we cannot predict) which will test both.
Nods.
pjhydroOf course large carriers are not infallible and all powerful. But if you have to deliver air power and have no land bases, they are all you have.
Agreed, no question. But thats not deterrent and it does come back to the original argument (way back in the mists of October) that losing the carriers is not the end of the Falklands as we do actually have a base!
As it was, Ark Royal could have launched aircraft even if 25 May could not. I believe 25 May was pretty slow by this stage, and needed a fair bit of wind over the deck. But that’s one area where the SHAR has the advantage over both types.
Yes in low wind conditions Ark would have been better off, but in high wind and big storms when Harriers were still up and the Argentinian land based stuff was still up, Ark would have been at a disadvantage. The Phantom/Gannet combo would have been infinitely better at stopping the SupEntendards and Exocet, but not if it was still on deck.
That said I would rather the RN had Ark Royal in 82 than not!
pjhydroPeople are getting hung up on CAMM being ASRAAM. Its isn’t. They are not a “common” missile. BAE/MBDA has used its experience of ASRAAM, there are elements of the engineering of ASRAAM in it, but its not a direct derivative at all, its a new missile.
pjhydroYes. Its not easy to engage a close-in crossing target with a semi-active missile because of the higher bearing rate of the inbound. Hopefully the cigarette packet sketch below will show why this can be the case for a near target and not a distant one.
What its meant to show is the difference in angular deflection between the inbound crossing at about 12km and at about 72km. The missile director has to track a high speed target through a much wider ark (red), much quicker, with the near target compared to the distant one. This should help show why a solution that works at 70km for SM-2 isnt so good for ESSM at 12-15km.
An AESA radar with multiaxis electronic beam steering and ICWI reduces this close-in tracking problem, as opposed to the traditional SPG-99 mechanical directors, and can provide a fair area capability so the story goes. Potentially APAR should offer similar capability, but, I’ve never seen it claimed by APAR users?. The active seeker head of weapons like VL Mica obviously eliminate the problem completely and makes those types of weapons more suitable for area applications.
very nice diagram 😀
pjhydroDidn’t see the message, hence no reply. Didn’t realise we were at war!
Oh its far more serious than that.:D
I don’t say the fleet carrier is the only deterrent, though it is a good one.
Agreed, as I have said many times I am a fan of carriers and the RN should own and operate them.
In the case of Argentine in 1977 and 1982, they would have to look at what Britain could do about an invasion of the Falklands. The only way air power could be brought to bear would be by aircraft carriers. We still had a fleet carrier in 1977, which would have been a major factor in their calculations.
But you are imbuing this single fleet carrier with an awful lot of potential that it might never have met. Yes the Argentineans would have considered it and how do you know they feared it? On paper Ark Royal was bringing 26 fighter bombers, half a dozen ASW helicopters and a flight of ancient AEW gannets. In 1982 the Argentineans had 4 times the number of aircraft and most of them were modern, useful aircraft. If like any half decent armed forces you have even a modicum of self belief then the basic maths of that comparison (we have 50 supersonic fighters they will have 12, we have 60 attack aircraft they have 14 etc) would imbue you with confidence because you would know that the UK was also doing the maths and perhaps they would decide it was futile too…i.e. the UK would be deterred by the force they have present in theatre It of course works both ways.
In 1982 we only had two light carriers with Sea Harriers, and we know the Argentines did not rate the SHAR, they evaluated it, and bought the Super Etendard instead. Clearly, not much in the way of deterrent.
History is full of examples of bad decisions. If the ARA VdM had been equipped with SHARS and not Skyhawks then we would have seen the first carrier vs carrier battle on 1st May 1982. As it was the weather did not allow VdM to launch her skyhawks – which is a very relevant and salient point when talking about how useful Ark Royal would have been in 1982, there would have been many non-flying days, which would not have been the case for land based types. You can’t talk up large carriers as infallible and all powerful, they really aren’t.
pjhydroWhat Journeyman demonstrated was that Britain took the defence of the Falklands seriously. But you cannot say that Ark Royal did not have any effect on Argentine actions. That just makes no sense to me.
It doesn’t have to. It only needed to make sense to the Argentinean Junta and the British Government. It did in 1977, it didn’t in the British Governments case in 1981/1982 and the rest as they say is history.
If Ark Royal had still existed in 1982 and given the same political climate and decisions would Argentina have not bothered to invade?
pjhydroYeesh probability is such a complex beast. I was giving this some thought (as its bloody interesting and my local is being refurbished at the moment)
Some points that occured to me.
Each “sortie” is a seperate event. It doesn’t matter how many times an aircraft has flown, like rolling a dice or fliping a coin a new sortie is a seperate probability event, not linked to the previous one or the one after it. Therefore regardless of airframe numbers the number of loses compared to number of sorties would appear to be an accurate measure of survival rate.
BUT!
The “sorties” would have to be a comparable measurement and by this I especially mean time. If for instance (not saying this was the case!) A10s flew twice as many sorties but each sortie was half the length of a harriers then parity is restored and actually their loss rates are the same.
A better measure would be the amount of time spent in the air compared to number of loses. Again this would be independent of aiframe numbers. (though if you did factor in airframe numbers I suppose A10s would have to be in the air for a quarter of the time to to establish parity? need more beer to chew that one over)
BUT!
This could lead to another problem, namely what was the time in the air spent doing. If for instance the harrier spent most of its time in transit on each sortie and only a small proportion of it in ‘harms way’ while the A10 spent the majority of its time being shot at then that would have a big effect on comparing the relative loss rates.
SO!
What I would want to know is how many hours each type spent ‘in combat’ in order to gauge which aircraft had the better loss rate.
i’ll get my coat. :p
pjhydroFor the record, I appreciate what the historical term “fleet in being” means. My point was that you seem to be of the opinion that Ark Royal would have no bearing on Argentine planners unless or until she actually turned up in the South Atlantic.
YES! Why would she? If shes not there she can’t harm them. Yes they would consider the possibility, of course they would, I have always said that, but until she is on her way its just a possibility and can, for the time being be disregarded. If deterrence worked as you suggest there would be very few wars and Navies could hang around in home waters drinking a lot of gin.
I would argue that, although in the Med at the time, Ark Royal (and indeed Hermes, Bulwark, Intrepid, Fearless et al) was functioning as a “fleet in being”, not held in port in the classical use of the term, but equally not in the actual area of operations.
Sorry thats not what it means, they were not acting anything, they were doing the myriad of tasks and ops the RN was doing at the time. Yes as I have said a dozen times the whole RN contributes to the overall effect of deterrence, of course it does, but deterrence is not that simple as I have explained – if only it was, we could keep the wolves at bay by maintaining a very cheap “fleet in being”!
Nonetheless, a fleet in the Med could be in the South Atlantic in two weeks, and that is what the Argentines had to take into consideration: if they attacked the Falklands, they would not have to contend just with British forces in the South Atlantic, but also with the naval forces which Britain would be able to bring into the theatre of operations without undue delay.
Precisely! Two weeks. You can invade, secure and dig in during that time. It’s a window of opportunity, you know where Britain’s carrier is and whats she’s up to, you take a gamble knowing she cannot harm you for at least that time period.
The invisible SSN that may or may not be already there (and how can you know??) on the other hand….
You are assuming that the Junta would fear the aftermath of invasion and that is your deterrence, i.e. the fact that Ark might come and ‘evict’ them a few weeks latter would act as enough deterrent to prevent the initial invasion. It’s a seductive argument (one that the 5 Admirals put in their letter) but its based on our rational view point, it assumes our opponent thinks the same and fears such consequences, which of course being an unpopular, nothing to lose military dictatorship with a cavalier attitude towards its conscripts, a fetish for making people vanish and a not entirely blind faith in world and UN support, is not a good assumption.
pjhydroSo the private message I sent you this morning offering a truce was to no avail? Time to wrap this up soon I think….
Gibraltar is a long way from the South Atlantic,
Been trying to tell you that for two weeks. None the less a schoolboy could work out the possible permutations of time/distance even over 8,000 miles.
and there is no requirement for the carrier to use her radar is there?
Well there is if it wants to navigate safely at night, control aircraft safely in all weathers and protect itself from air attack…
That is what rader pickets and AEW are for.
And they all give off emissions that can be detected and you draw a circle around your detected AEW Gannet the size of its radius of action and bingo the carrier is in that bit of sea.
A downed MPA doesn’t tell you very much, you don’t know where it has been shot down, or even if it has been shot down, and anyway your target can move over thirty nautical miles in an hour.
A downed aircraft is a huge piece of intelligence. They are generally in regular radio contact, you would know where it was going, time it went down and bingo….and as for thirty knots, well thats not exactly a difficult piece of maths is it? “…lets see its been two hours, its moved a maxiumum of sixty miles, jeez our 300+MPH MPA will have trouble making up that distance….”
With Phantoms and Buccaneers, Ark Royal could have operated well out of the range of any Argentine aircraft, and still maintained air superiority over the Falklands, a capability which was in a different league from the plucky Sea Harriers in 1982. Nothing much for the Argentines to have to consider?
Still with the “not consider” ?- when have I ever said that? But heres the knub – it doesn’t matter, a Phantom or a Bucc could not fly deterrence patrols from over 8000 miles away and its deterrence we are talking about.
Operation Journeyman does seem to have convinced the Argentines that an invasion would be opposed. But that is only one part of deterring aggression.
Seem to have? seem to have? DID. Its not really a point of debate, its just fact.
The other part is, opposed by what? In 1977, he Argentines were successfully made aware that Britain would oppose an invasion, and had the assets to make it so.
There is no “other part” you have listed both. British Government demonstrated will and sent the assets required to back that will up.
In 1982, neither of these conditions were met.
No only one of them, which was political will, there were plenty of assets, they just didn’t use them.
Your logic, as I have said before in a point you have never answered, leads to the unavoidable conclusion that a fleet carrier is the only true form of deterrent and therefore all other warships in ours and all other navies are pointless and provide little, which comes back to the original point over whether the RN still provides a useful deterrent or not, which given that carriers are just one type of ship in a whole plethora of available ships and boats and given the evidence of 1977 is patently not true.
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