Could this have something to do with Tornado’s expected airframe life limits?

If the MOD were expecting to have F35 deliveries arriving in the second half of the decade, as the Tornado stands down, and are now facing a potential shift of F35 to the early part of the 2020s. Then they may be looking at several years of having only the Typhoon in opperational service. If thats the case then an interim buy of enough new airframes to stand up 2/3 squadrons may seem very necessary.

Just a thought.

If they do not complete Queen Elizabeth then that leaves Prince of Wales to do all the acceptance trials, which would put the aircraft trials into the 2020s rather than the end of the decade. If you read the First Sea Lords bit, posted earler, you will see he is talking of QE doing years of trials.

I think it goes back to the Greek language origins of the New Testament – the alpha and the omega, being the ‘first’ and the ‘last’.

I am afraid I don’t find the idea of deploying air power from land being somehow cheap and easy very convincing. When flying from a foreign airfield there are a lot of issues to worry about beyond the normal costs (keeping it within NATO will help but that also severely limits your area of operations).

What will they charge you per flight, this may rise substantially if they are the only place willing to take you in. This is ignoring the cost in ‘aid money’ or political capital that you may have to pay to get in at all.

Does the host nation require approval of all flight plans involving live ordnance prior to take off?

Will they require that their personnel are in the loop to approve the firing of such ordnance in real time?

If either of the above is the case will they be kind enough to pay for their people or pass the cost on. I suspect the latter.

What about the cost of the Foreign Office personnel to negotiate the deal and to monitor and liaise during the operations to make sure it is all working and your host nation is not about to shut you down or throw you out?

Expeditionary air power is expensive stuff, there is no cheap option. Land basing is expensive as is sea basing but at least the carrier option comes with more national sovereignty and fewer people in the command loop.

I do believe that the carriers will be built, there are pressing industrial and contractual reasons why this will happen. What is worrying is that there appears to be no clear plan as to how they will be made to function as warships. As this would require a trained air group with a substantial fixed wing element and at the moment there is no convincing plan in the public domain as to how this will be provided.

A lot has been written about a small number of RN pilots on exchange with the USN but I think those contracts were let with the US prior to SDSR when the RN still manned a Harrier squadron. What will they do on return? Sadly I assume that they will face the same choice as the other RN Harrier pilots – rotary, general service or redundancy.

The F35 is now the replacement for the Tornado, so logic predicts that it is the RAF Tornado pilots that will transfer to the F35 in the second half of the decade. I know there was a statement that the F35 will be flown by RAF and RN pilots, but I fear this was just a form of words to placate the RN and prevent any embarrassing resignations. My reasoning is that if they were serious we would see the substance to allow for this, and this surely would be the standing up of a RN Tornado Squadron. This would provide a core capability from which exchanges with the USN could be drawn to add the deck skills that would be needed on conversion to the F35. I can’t imagine the MOD paying for most of a squadron of RN pilots to stay in the US for the next 5-10 years as well as paying for pilots for the Typhoon and Tornado. So that option seems a financial non starter.

I assume that the RAF reassured the government that they would provide the aircrew and that some RN personnel could be allowed into the fast jet training pipeline to serve on RAF squadrons in the future. Just how this could work regarding a functional air group I am not sure. All well and good on a summers day in a calm North Sea for a bit of training, but combat tempo day/night opps in all weather off a foreign coastline? The RAF will surely argue that for safety reasons they would need to fly from land with tanker support.

All in all the decision to keep Tornado and lose Harrier creates a fixed wing naval disconnect between where we were a few month ago and where we are supposed to be in 2019/20.

Perhaps the solution that will emerge is a Euro duty carrier role with CVF as the other half to Charles de Gaulle. The RN providing the ASW with Merlin and the MN the fixed wing element with Rafale and Hawkeye. The other solution would be technological with the development of a robust hands off auto-land system that removed the premium on skill and experience of at sea operations making CVF to all intents and purposes just a mobile RAF station.

Why would they need desert camouflage? What enemy is going to be above them looking down?

If you extrapolate the escort numbers trend on to the early 2020s then 14 is probably about right. Its only a reduction of 5 units over more than a decade.

There are missiles widely available today that make helicopter AEW near pointless. To make CVF deployable anywhere near a capable threat fixed wing AEW will be essential. There is no advantage to pointing this out to a Prime Minister who is still probably still angry that he could not cancel the ships just yet. The push will come from 2015 onwards.

Pooling with the French Navy means a 2 or 3 aircraft purchase by the UK giving a 5-6 Anglo-French pool. Enough for two deployed peacetime and four on a war footing. That is affordable and the support will be helped by leaning on the MN and USN. It also fits the allied interoperability test.