Geoff_BWell I think the navy are playing the long game on this one, they managed to keep both carriers in production in SDSR. Now they are keeping things in play until after 2015 SDSR, they know its insane not to fit out both carriers for CATOBAR operations. Even it is a case of ensuring that one of the carriers is built with as much work done as possible to allow CAT and trap installation, machine spaces partially installed and the troughs and JDB ready – even if they are plated over then its a victory. It will take several years after 2020 to have properly working flight operations on one of the carriers, that leaves time to sneak funding for final system fit out on the second carrier in the latter half of that decade. The real mission of the RN is to ensure that they keep any potential buyers for the second carrier at arms length and away from the Treasury! I didn’t like it when ministers took the Brazilian defence minister to see QE construction!
Well it does appear a little odd that Foxwent out of his way to say both carriers and confirmed it before an MOD officer tried to cover it up. I suspect they are looking to place contracts with the suppliers for four EMALS and two sets of arrestor gear as will be cheaper than two job lots.
To be honest i suspect the NAO costing of the £950mill for one carrier Cat & Trap conversion is a bit of smoke & mirrors, part of that money will be for design changes which will be applied to both, and i think the unexplained chunk is the shipbuilding compensation payment for the manufacturing gap as CVF goes into fitting out and the Type 26 production starts to kick in.
I think they will eventually formally confirm that both will be fitted out and that one will be in service whilst the other is in reserve. Naming both ships in honour of the crown and then having one as a toothless terror would be a major faux par and would go down poorly with the public & party, its also a point the opposition can jab away at if left unresolved before the next election.
Geoff_BPretty much, but I think they’ve been playing these games for most of the 2000s, it’s only becoming so obvious now because the illusion of having all the money for these big projects has been exposed for the bull**** that it has been since the 1998 SDR.
Yeap when the last lost first announced the carriers back in 2004 they said then that 10 Billion would be ring fenced for the CVF & JCA programs. that was when the carriers were due for delivery in 2012/2014 allowing the CVS ships to retire.
Geoff_BLiger
Nice to see confirmation from Fox on that statement, and nice to see an MP listening and asking for confirmation.
As to the F-35C going off the NAO audit report it looks likely as expected that we will only have token numbers of F-35C by the end of the decade as Rear Admiral Hussain in the NAO reviiew meeting only expects to see 6 on board by 2020 out of 18 expected to be delivered by that point..
I suspect the orders placed in this decade will be no more than 40 aircraft to give us our OEU unit and get the first carrier unit going However they will probably look at another batch or possibly 2 of similar numbers to replace Tornado and bring up on paper at least the capability to field two full carrier wings.
In terms of the British Army and its armour i would think following 2015 its going to be at least a decade to reorganise, and refit for what ever future role is planned for it. The Royal Marines & Paratrooper along with light Infantry to back them up are likely to stay the same but they are going to have to take on the lessons learned from the last 20 years to determine what its capabilities should be and what equipment best suites that need !!.
Geoff_Bif you ask me, there is a difference between what the government/liam fox are prepared to say they are funding and what they want in the long term.
I think they will keep both carriers beyond the next election and they will buy more f35 than they are stating at the moment (f35 funds also mentioned in the Fox statement today).
Well the F-35 funds are to fund the initial orders anyway, the announcement just fills in the funding black hole for the new kit they needed for 2020 as some of those contracts will have to be signed soon.
Checking Fox’s statement on Hansard and he does use the plural to refer to cats & traps for the CVF class ships, so if may well be they are looking to equip both ships with full carrier hardware.
I suspect the fear of having either ship appear as a toothless terror may have played a part especially with them being royal ships. At least as fully capable carriers they are interchangable or can be utilised as an LPH or cover the French CdG when it is in for refit. Whilst the minimal initial airgroup may be picked upon at least they have options to order the planned additional batches of F-35C in the next decade or should circumstances warrant it lease aircraft from the USN as a stop gap if nessessary which are eaier to explain than having an unequiped carrier sat in the dockyard.
Geoff_BWell i was kinda surprised to see LM were allowed to charge for their crash diet redesign when they cocked up the original design. It wasn’t a customer change of specification redesign it was a manufactureres costly blunder thats still having a knock on effect, so i can see why Senator McCain is so rattled by the program over charging.
Geoff_Bhttp://grandlogistics.blogspot.com/
Scroll down the page for some intresting news on cats and traps
Anybody else who read the NAO audit report and seen the subsequent select commitee meeting video want to slap the moron who created the report for not being able to understand what is meant by 2 rail and 4 rail systems.
Some MP looked a complete pillock when he read the paragraph indictaing the risk of the 2 rail emals as opposed to 4 rail used by the USN for their Ford carrier. He obviously assumed it was a 2 rail catapult as opposed to the USn 4 rail catapult and was thus inferior, where as somebody such as Admiral Hussain should have said that means we will use 2 Cataplut launchers as opposed to the 4 the USN carrier have and the risk factor is they would would loose only 25% capacity is a launcher fails compared to our 50%.
Geoff_BI think half the cost is tied to extending the build over a longer period as they have put back the delivery dates which put the costs up 20% last time Gordon Brown stretched them out
Geoff_BQuoted from the linked press release by Eurofighter.com.
So it seems the Typhoon dominated… Mig 29s, F-16s, M2Ks, F-4s and Hawk/Alpha Jet trainers.
A tremendous achievement ! :diablo:I’ll preemptively do the obvious trollish comment :
“The Typhoons took the opportunity to shine against older aircraft during an exercise while the Rafales were busy fighting a real war” :p
Well if you think hard about it you will realise that with France being the ONLY operator of the Rafale they would be hard pressed to maintain Air Ops over Libya, Afghanistan and participate in NATO exercises. Typhoon on the other hand is used by a number of airforces and as the German Air Force is not involved in the NATO no-fly operation over Libya they therfore can join in the exercises and dominate
Geoff_BAlso mentioned the same quote in the MOD Desider Magazine too.
Glad to see they are still going ahead with the Transfer, although i would have preferred to see a few more Merlins purchased rather than flogging the dead horse known as Puma
Geoff_BBTW, I’m sure I read somewhere that the MiG-29K can take off 90% of the time under tropical conditions when the carrier speed is just 10 knots.
When on earth did they do those flight tests ?, the only time the Indian Navy Migs have been to sea was Carrier trials in Russian waters aboard Kuznetsov ?.
Geoff_BAnyway enough of this pointless hindsight talk as utterly pointless due to the way the CVF & JCA program has changed and evolved since its inception in response to events both at home and around the globe that have meant the program and its importance within the UK defence stucture has adapted from its cold war focus.
Some interesting bits on the Carrier and JCA program in the latest MOD inhouse magazine Desider.
Construction of QE, start on PoW, F-35C and even Illustrious. Leiger will be anoyed to read in the F-35 article :- “The event provided a valuable exchange of information, paving the way for UK Queen Elizabeth first of-class flight trials”
Geoff_BNot to go “i said it to you”… But the NAO report proves me right:
Quote:
Working with the Alliance, the Department has begun to develop its understanding of the costs of converting a carrier. The estimates are still immature but, based on a planning assumption of converting the second carrier during build (which offers the best balance of cost, risk, time and performance), the Department estimates costs will be between £800 million and £1,200 million. Converting the second carrier (Prince of Wales) could allow the Department to use the first carrier (Queen Elizabeth) to mitigate risks by testing the major platform systems (which are common to both ships) and familiarising the crew with the operation of the warship.It is Prince of Wales that gets converted, not QE. Queen Elizabeth will enter service in 2016 as planned, and work as LPH/training carrier for the deck personnel that will then go on PoW.
Converting QE would have had a disproportionate cost by screwing up the building schedule.
QE will work as LPH from 2016 to at least 2020… and when PoW hits in-service date, the state of the budget will dictate what happens. For now, the idea is that QE will get mothballed, but things can (and hopefully will) change for the better.
Wrong 🙁 you mis-read what it say the Key factor is the word COULD, as from a cost point of view they see savings of using QE to prove the basic design and systems allowing the fully capable PoE to enter Service later.
However they also know there is more than costs involved as there is a certain element of politics & prestige that comes into play and you dont build a ship in honour of the monarch only to have it serve a castrated role for a short period of time and then to be replaced by a ship named after the heir with the the lead ship earmarked for mothballing or possible sale
Geoff_BI do agree with Jonesey that IF the F35B did what it said on the box then the scenario that he paints is a good and logical one. My issues with the F35B are inter alia It cannot land back on fully loaded with weapons so some may have to be dumped in the sea. The weapons load anyway is much smaller than its sisters. The range is lower than its sisters. There are as I understood it major issues with cracks in parts of the fuselage.
Yes if the only difference between the A, B and C was the B did STOVL and the C did Catobar, fine the B makes sense. For an aircraft to be a strike platform as I see it range and hence endurance combined with weapons load capability would seem to be the USPs that the purchaser should look for, this would suggest that of the F35s the C is the one to go for. Who owns them is a policy issue for the MOD….
Thats pretty much what the UK did, when originally selected the B as the preferred choice for JCA the it matched the A in all but range due to the lift fan in place of fuel capacity. Plus it was first one expected into service and matched our timeline with the minimal change to operating practices.
When the B’s specs were lowered following the weight cockup, the previos govt adopted a wait and see approach preferring to see what happend once the flight testing had been done, as they still had till 2012 before making the final choice. Last year the flight testing was less than spectacular, performance was shown to be little better than the Harrier it was to replace at an astronomic unit cost , and with Gates aiming to isolate the B from the rest of the program it proved a wise choice to switch to the more capable Catobar F-35C variant which is more in line with our Carrier Strike goals
Geoff_BBut at least the French have a carrier, and we do not. My point is that if we had had the foresight, Eurofighter should have been made carrier compatible from the start. By now we should be looking at Sea Typhoons flying off our own carriers, instead of the possibilty that some time around 2020 we may or may not see a handful of F35s flying off a carrier. The French at least showed a capacity for a bit of long term planning, something we seem incapable of.
Using hindsight to push foresight is a rather pointless exercise in this case, if you study the timelines we had no requirement for a large carrier or carrier capable conventional aircraft when the Eurofighter program started.
France had carriers and had a new one under construction and after being stuck with the F-8 Crusader for lack of suitable smaller carrier capable combat aircraft it therfore wanted a naval variant eof the ECA. Everybody else wanted a new generation cold war fighter for use on the iron curtain against the new generation of Soviet fighters that were starting to appear.
The most the FAA could wish for was a supersonic capable STOVL aircraft and a pair of larger STOVL carriers to make up the shortfall in the CVS/SHAR combo which were the result of design restrictions and compromises. (Two with a capacity for 40-50 aircraft being more efficient than maintaining 3 with a max capacity of 15-20).
Sure RN would have loved the chance of CATOBAR carriers with new generation aircraft but at the time they had their SSBNs being replaced, the Amphib fleet, the SSNs and desperatley trying to find a Type 42 replacement. Whilst the RAF wanted as many Eurofighters it could get to replace its legacy combat aircraft from the 60s & 70s and to complement its Tornados till they were due for renewal.
Geoff_BI’ll bet you she can’t, not without serious help anyway, perhaps that is what the french used to sweeten the mistral deal.
I think you’ll find they will be brushing off the Ulyanovsk design which they started building towards the cold war only for it to be scrapped on the slips by the Ukraine when the Money ran out.
Given the two year design period the only viable way to achieve this is too review and revamp their existing design to take into account the advances in technology, materials and expereince of operating Kuznetsov over the last 25 years
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