A lot of that is based on urban myths and selective media reporting. And the point remains, would people rather have a tightly regulated industrial safety culture or a return to the days before the early 70’s take off of industrial safety improvement? And doing a RA is hardly hard, for a start once you set up a decent template system you can use these and adjust them as required for any changes for the particular job, and even if you start from scratch using the HSE specimen RA form is not dificult. Everybody does a mental RA for everything they do whether they realise it or not, the regs have just formalised this and left an audit trail. I work in an industry where the internal safe systems of work are extremely tight with permits to work, system failure analysis, job safety analysis etc, way in advance of anything a school teacher would ever have to do or a light changer, and honestly don’t find it to be a big deal, and I’d rather take the time to do the paper work than take a short cut and fry somebody because of a simple hazard that should be identified and neutralised prior to starting the job.

Interesting, the machinery fit will need a high pressure, high evaporation rate boiler.

Politically, once building work starts it’ll be very hard to make a split and there will be a lot of pressure on both countries to stay with the program, even given the structure of the deal.

On another note, does anybody know what catapults the French version will use? Will they use an Emcat? If they use steam catapults it’ll mean fitting steam plant to the design, which will be a significant change to the machinery fit and could have implications on other parts of the design.

Let’s look at this from another angle, the UK has one of the best industrial safety records in the world. Now is anybody going to tell me that is a bad thing? We should be proud of our achievements in safety at work, not villifying the HSE and other agencies that were a huge part of bringing this happy state about. Grey Area makes a good comparison with the factories act. I think it’s very easy to look on the past as some halcyon golden era but have people looked at accident statistics, life expectancies etc. in the 19th. and first half of the 20th. centuries?
I’ve worked in hazardous industries all my life, from the air force, via jet engine commissioning and service work and the offshore oil industry to working in the nuclear industry, and I can tell you in all of that (AF excepted as it was then outside much of the regulatory framework, although in practice most guidelines were followed anyway) I’ve had a lot more positive impressions of UK safety law than negative, and having worked around the world I can tell you an aweful lot of people in other countries would love our safety regulations. I have never found safety regs an undue burden, use reasonable risk assessment and good method statements, work plans, system failure analysis etc. and it’s something you can plan into your work with really not that much additional effort. However, it’s much easier to look at examples of people who don’t have proper training in what the regs mean and then printing stories to make safety inspectors, who have saved a hell of a lot of lives, into villains.

Interesting design, I wouldn’t read too much into the lack of web site info, most of the worlds warship builders are trying to get into the stealth market. That said, modern warships are already pretty stealthy, even the RN Type 23’s, early 80’s design, are pretty stealthy.

And don’t forget, you’re talking mainly (except Russia) about NATO countries, where you could see some pooling of forces in a crisis with a common foe. So, essentially, in case no US carriers and LHA in theater, there basically 3 + 2 + 1 + 1 = 7 carriers for the European theater (North Atlantic + Med). This sets the nato countries apart from other single carrier operators e.g. Brazil and India.

Maybe true in the cold war (although even there countries acted outside of NATO, such as the UK in 1982) but today it seems NATO is much less relevant and more and more deployments are as part of ops outside NATO (for the UK, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan prior to the NATO involvement, Iraq) and countries need to have freedom to act independently. Given the failure of NATO to manage it’s Afghan deployment it makes you wonder about it’s real value in a post cold war world anyway.

One of the problems is people don’t understand H&S law and so just take the easy way out and pretend the reason they can’t do things is H&S regulation when in reality it is because nobody has bothered to train them properly on applying the regulations. Even the HSE is peeved and sent out a circular on reasonable risk assessment and slammed those hiding behind ignorance of the regulations.