Hi folks, apologies to the moderators about resurrecting an old thread but it was the only one I could find re: CVA-01 and I didn’t want to start a new one. I’ve watched a couple of documentaries over the years about carrier ops and at the beginning of each day, a party of crew members walk in a line from bow to stern looking for rubbish and such like that could be sucked up into engine intakes or burst tyres on undercarriages, the FOD Plod as its called in the RN. Typically when the party reached the stern they’d throw what they found over the round-down. Now assuming there’s a good reason why you don’t throw it over the side and given the fact that CVA-01 flight decks ended short of the stern with the open quarter deck, how was FOD to be disposed of? Placed in bags and then chucked overboard from the fantail? Anyone have any ideas?

Its a pity the organisers probably can’t get a Phantom or Buccaneer in FAA colours to participate. St Athan was where HMS Ark Royal‘s fixed-wing aircraft flew to to be handed over to the RAF in late November 1978.

Enterprise officialy decommishioned today 12/1/12 at NOB Norfolk. During the ceremony the Sec Navy announced that CVN-80 will be named Enterprise.

Across the globe thousands of Star Trek fans will be having heart attacks and engaging in vigorous, even acrimonious online debates because it means all those wall displays of past Enterprises in Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek: The NExt Generation and Star trek First Contact are no longer canon :diablo:.

The problem with Skybolt in my opinion wasn’t that it wasn’t a credible deterrent, it was under the right circumstances. But rather that (A) it was a ‘country specific’ deterrent and (B) it was one portion of a greater deterrent force, ‘The Nuclear Triad’.
Taking (A) first, the size and geography of the US meant that you didn’t necessarily need airborne alerts (I believe the USAF ended them in 1968 following the loss of a Bomber making an emergency landing at Thule Air Force Base). Bombers could have stayed on the ground at readiness, possibly with crews strapped in. As long as they had a few minutes warning of attack, enough servicable B-52s could have got airborne with an expectation of surviving blasts on their way to launching positions, to make Skybolt a viable threat.
Compare that with Britain which is an island, large as islands go, but only a fraction of the area of the continental US, even with ‘Mickey Finn’ which was the codename for dispersing the V-bombers in quartets to the 24 dispersal bases, they were still on this relatively ‘tiny’ island. Ironically given some of the criticism levelled at the ‘cruise missile to replace Trident’ lobby on these boards, all it would have taken was a couple of Soviet SSGNs to sneak in close to the North Sea coast or even travel up the mouth of one of our larger rivers or estuaries (Soviet subs allegedly sailed up the Bristol Channel during the Cold War) and shower those areas where the V-Bombers were dispersed with cruise missiles with little if any warning and the V-Force would have become so much scrap.
And bare in mind even a sustained period of tension wouldn’t necessarily produce dispersal. During the Cuban Missile Crisis Harold MacMillan didn’t order ‘Mickey Finn’ for fear of sending the wrong signal to Nikita Khruschchev, so the V-Bombers may all have been clustered in Lincolnshire and East Anglia.
As for (B), Skybolt was meant to be used in concert with SLBMs, initially Polaris, but ultimately Poseidon and ICBMS, initially Titan but ultimately the Minuteman series. If you will it was one more thing that the Soviets would have had to contend with in the event of a nuclear confrontation. With Britain it would have been our only strategic weapon system as its unlikely we would have adopted a nuclear triad, though admittedly France a comparable country did give it a go with its Mirage IVs, its La Redoutable class SSBNs and its SSBS ICBMs.

Sources: B-52 Stratofortress:Boeing’s Cold War Warrior by Robert F Dorr & Lindsay Peacock.
Jane’s Fighting Ships 1970/71 edited by Raymond V.B. Blackman.
Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft 1968/69 edited by John W.R. Taylor.

Errrrrr no! Quite the reverse! SSBN were better at the role in that sense as the four SSBN had an ability to strike any part of the globe from any ocean in thirty minutes flat!

In fairness Fedaykin until we got the Vanguards with their Trident D5s we couldn’t. The Resolutions had Polaris which had about a third of Trident’s range. And I believe only one boat was ever on patrol at a time.

Hi Guys
I’ve been reading along this interesting historical tangent you’ve taken about Skybolt and its viability as an alternative to Polaris and I keep thinking back to a book I had last Christmas called ‘Vulcan’s Hammer’ by Chris Gibson which I heartily recommend. In it, among other things he discusses projects associated with Skybolt including plans to use TSR2s as Skybolt carriers.
Something that came up in Chapter 6 of the book entitled ‘Pofflers The V Force and Skybolt’ was the strain that Skybolt ops would place on the V-Force and how the V-Bombers were intended for discrete missions eg twice weekly 7 hour long conventional raids or a one-off nuclear strike not round the clock cycles of take-offs and landings which would eat up their fatigue lives. As the book pointed out all the Soviets would need to do was create a period of tension long enough to ground the V-Force through over use.
To fulfill the role of Patrol Missile Carrier the idea was mooted of using modified Super VC-10 airliners on the basis that they were designed for constant use with treble the Vulcan’s fatigue life. They would have been able to carry up to 8 Skybolts, would have had crew rest areas, additional fuel tanks as well as inflight refuelling capabilities and when tensions relaxed could also be used as transports or tankers. With suggestions to get the heavy VC-10s airborne including reheated engines and RATO.
Just thought I’d put that out there.

Wrong way round. The people who made Bond films in the 1960s dressed their villains like Chinese dignitaries.

Fedaykin: yes, she looks pretty good inside.

Hi Swerve, I was just being a bit mischevious :diablo:.