Last night I spent an hour watching Ursula Brennan, head of the MoD, giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee. The level of knowledge of the committee members seemed pretty basic to me, though to be fair they are not the Defence Select Committee. Ursula Brennan did not impress me in the slightest. She was vague, evasive, refused to answer questons and seemed to have no mastery of her brief, unless her brief was to tell the MPs as little as possible. However, based on what she did say, I would reckon that there is a very strong chance that we will be reverting to the F35B, the wrong decision in my opinion, but hardly surprising given the complete mess this government has made of defence.

What has any of this political drivel got to do with CVF unles your some kind of lefty fanboy.

You are obviously forgetting.
When they were ordered with the basis that the design had them so that they could be fitted with cat’s and traps at a later date if the requirement was decided that this be the case.
Who’s to say we’ll actually see them in service based on the kind of quick throwaway assesment you have made, even years before they ever put to sea.

This “political drivel” is what is driving this issue. We have a defence secretary, Phillip Hammond, who knows nothing at all about defence, but was shoved into the job because of the furore about Dr Fox (who did know about defence) and his dodgy friend Mr Werrity.

As to the idea that the CVFs might be fitted with cats & traps at a future date, surely you must see that if it is deemed too difficult and expensive to do when the ships are being built, there is no way it will be done in 20 or 30 years’ time, when the hulls are old and the ships would need a major refit to be equipped with them? It’s now or never.

I think we can take it as read that if the CVF hulls are not fitted with cats and traps at the building stage, then there is no chance at all that they will be retrofitted with them 20 years down the line. It simply will not happen. The reality therefore is that the two ships will be limited to the F35B for their careers, as I rather doubt that there will be any motivation to design a subsequent STOVL plane after the F35B. Any sort of future proofing for the CVF programme will have been lost.

It is clear that the current administration is completely disfunctional. After the granny tax, the pasty tax, the church repair tax and the charity tax fiascos, the all enveloping omni-shambles is too big to ignore. We are being governed by people who are simply not up to the job.

On the proviso that F-35B meets its projected performance figures there is nothing unachieveable with the STOVL hull that is defined in Carrier Strike.

And isn’t that the nub of the problem? If you go for the F35B you are betting the carrier programme on a single, troubled, aeroplane which sems rather unlikely to meet its projected performance figures. Personally, I think that the whole idea of going for a supersonic, stealthy, STOVL aircraft design is flawed. Any one of those features makes for an expensive aeroplane. Two make for a very expensive aeroplane. All three might just be more than can be done at any price!

I think the F35 programme is making the same mistakes as the F111 in the 60s. The idea is that you can save money by having one aeroplane do every job, fighter, bomber, Navy, Air Force etc etc. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. Think how much money could have been saved if the USMC had been allowed to develop an evolved Harrier to do the jobs they really need doing. They don’t need a supersonic stealth aircraft to support Marines on the ground, especially when one F35B will have a smaller bombload than a Harrier and cost three, four or five times as much. That’s not smart thinking by any stretch of the imagination. It makes as much sense as building a 1000 foot long, 65,000 ton carrier and deciding to limit it to STOVL operations.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and needless to say, we are so much wiser because of it.

Rather than the re-construction of HMS Victorious 1950-58, the immediate post war project to build at least 2 Malta class carriers, 46,000 tons displacement plus a 900ft plus flight deck, should have been re-surrected in the 50s with all the new (British) innovations, such as angled deck, mirror sight, steam catapult etc, for completion by the time the WW2 Formidable class carriers were due for retirement in the mid to late 1950s. The larger Malta class would have been capable of operating an array of modern and large attack aircraft with ease, not forgetting other types, on a par with the big US super carriers.

Gerry R

Gerry:

I’d advance another theory.

This would have been for the Royal Navy to have built Eagle and Ark Royal, together with Albion, Bulwark, Centaur and Hermes, with Hermes built to the same standards as her half-sisters, and no modernisation of Victorious. If this had happened, the Navy would have had six pretty modern carriers by the mid 50s, dispensing with the wartime armoured carriers, which were so expensive to modernise that it was only attempted for Victorious.

Apart from updating them with steam catapults and angled decks, I would not have changed these ships significantly. The modernisation of Eagle took five years, and was hugely expensive, and the modernisation of Ark Royal was cheaper, but still took three years. The LPH role given to Albion and Bulwark could have been done by ships of the Colossus and Glory classes instead, there were several spare hulls which could have been used.

Imagine that huge amounts had not been spent on Victorious, Hermes, Eagle and Ark Royal. In the mid 60s we would still have had six carriers, which is as many destroyers as we have now! They would not have been able to operate the Phantom, true, but would nonetheless have been a major naval force. Would it have been easier to protect the programme to build a new generation of carriers in the late 60s and early 70s if huge amounts had not been spent on rebuilds of wartime designed ships? We’ll never know of course, but in reality, is there anything that the expensively updated ships did which could not have been done by the more basic carriers? Don’t forget, at this time the Royal Navy still had a major worldwide role, and was tasked with keeping two carriers east of Suez at all times. Two large Malta type ships would have represented too great a concentration of power for the job the Navy had at the time, which was essentially keeping the peace east of Suez, whilst RAF Bomber Command had the job of nuclear deterrence of the Soviet Union.

For a start, I would never have begun the Nimrod MRA4 programme. Trying to rebuild 40 year old airframes was always going to be poor value compared to simply using new build aircraft, whether they were Orions, P8s, or something based on an Airbus. Anything would have been better.

Going back further, after the success of naval aviation in 1982, the Royal Navy had effectively saved Mrs Thatcher’s neck, and should have made the most of it. Good though the Sea Harrier was, STOVL aircraft can never have the ability of CTOL. The three Invincible class and the SHARs were obviously going to remain in service until the early 2000s, but the plan should have been put in place to replace them with CTOL carriers operating Sea Typhoons. The Typhoon programme should have been navalised from the start, as the French wanted. This would have secured the future of the Fleet Air Arm, and by today we would have two carriers in service with a full complement of Sea Typhoons.

One thing I would never have done is fallen for Joint Force Harrier. This meant that the Navy effectively gave up control of the fixed wing FAA, merging it with the RAF’s Harrier force. The upshot was that first the Sea Harrier and then the Harrier was deleted at the behest of the RAF. How the Navy ever fell for that one is beyond me. If they expected the RAF to treat the FAA with any level of fairness or decency then their naivety was simply staggering.

So long as it catches the first wire there shouldn’t be a problem!

I see they have shown 12 F35s on deck. So that’s what the air group will look like. At least there won’t be a problem finding room for them.