JonesyJonesy………
A lot of what you say may well be correct however this does not excuse bad behavior by Mr Meeson, certainly in front of customers. I have never met Mr Meeson but it would appear he has a reputation which he oviously wished to live up to. If it was done a fit of temper he should learn to exert some self control.
That sort of behavior usually creates resentment. Management should lead by example.
Planemike
For my part Mike if I was stood in a 200ft long queue at check in, whilst watching desk staff mill around at idle, I’d be absolutely made up if the airlines senior management walked in and dealt with the situation in a direct and concise fashion.
Who cares about resentment from poorly performing staff?. They should deliver the service they are paid to – if they meet that basic requirement of employment they dont give anyone the opportunity to find fault – ergo no-one has their feelings hurt!. If they are incapable of delivering better service its best they seek alternate employment for all concerned!.
Perhaps this chap may have been better served finding the line managers of the desk staff and aiming his opening salvoes there but, for me, the distinction between petulance and passion is a slim one and I wouldn’t fault the man for being passionate about his business.
JonesyTwo words – public relations. If nothing else the display of empathy with the customers, genuine or not, shows that the man has his priorities correct. Looking at 60m’s of queueing, paying, customers his FIRST responsibility is to find out what is going on and ensure that his customers are handled as efficiently and professionally as humanly possible. His responsibility is to protect his staff from criticism only where a delay is not attributable to them.
If they have 60m queues, whilst members of staff are visibly untasked, he is entirely correct to find out why that situation exists and, if no good explanation comes back, to deal with that situation appropriately. If the dainty souls on the passenger desks are reduced to quivering wrecks by someone hurling a bit of anglo-saxon at them I would suggest they are probably not best suited to a pressurised customer-facing environment. My ex-wife worked the desks at MAN for Servisair so dont come it with the ‘they have enough to do’ malarkey either…..the job is no more stressful than any other similar customer-facing role!. She certainly had a far more stressful time working in a motorway service station than she did at that airport!.
Certainly if I turned in a performance that was as lamentable as that described in the article, that triggered this, I would expect to have to explain myself to my management and the customers involved. Its noteworthy also that the article omits to mention whether or not the queues disappeared immediately after the incident and customer service levels improved!.
JonesyKev all i can see from the picture and all as far as i know that commenter can see is 2 8 Cell VLS launchers. They may have other sources of information if they do fair enough but i doubt there are 48 VLS cells or ever really will be.
There are 6-cell VLMICA launchers mounted on the Khareefs so there is nothing odd or unrealistic about the self-defence suite initially being based on 12 quad-packed VLS cells.
Similarly there is nothing wrong with air-defence based on large numbers of shorter-ranged ‘local area’ capable anti-missile weapons – after all there are few potential aggressor states that could point at hundreds of operationally serviceable anti-ship missiles in their inventories. If you were to try and depend on a ‘missile-soak’ defence though you might wish for more, perhaps, than 48 ready rounds in the magazine!.
Also found it interesting that the forward raised section of the midships deckhouse looks to be housing a single VLS module. Scaling off that deckhouse looks to be about 7-8m high. A70 VLS module for LACM capability perhaps?. Cant fathom many other reasons for such an installation.
Agree with the earlier comments on the parent/child hangar concept. Looks like another BVT folly similar to the midships light davits on the Venator design that occupy massively useable space to accomodate a couple of light RHIB’s, for ships boats, when the whole stern end is a garage stuffed with the things.
JonesyCVF will be expensive as hell. I seriously believe ti woul dbe possible to put together a 40k carrier capable of operating 20-25 jets with AEW as well for soemthing in the region of $900mill -1bill
You could have done. In fact that was the sort of numbers the Treasury tried to stamp on the project.
Problem is that with that size airgroup, with that size flight deck/hangar space and with the commensurately smaller hull volume for avcat, spares and air ordnanace the 40k ton hull would get nowhere close to generating the sortie rates required for the operational window required.
In short all we’d get is a carrier and not the carrier capability that meets the design criteria.
CVF is the size it is because it NEEDS to be that big. The size isnt arbitrary in some vain attempt to match a US vessel or be one-up on the French!.
Jonesygrim. Going to be offline a few days but wanted to make a quick point about the difference between an SSBN and a hunter killer. You mentioned an ssn with a dozen strategic missile tubes?.
No chance. An ssn must be manoeuverable in three dimensions. SLBM tubes would wipe that out. You’d end up with a poor bomber and a poor hunter and not the efficient design you are hoping for.
Jonesy…what he said!.
A supersonic attempts to defeat countermeasures by minimising its exposure window through the targets defensive-systems envelope. The inherent problem with that is that it simultaneously reduces the available window of opportunity for the missiles seeker to do all the things it needs to do. .
Historically, therefore, supersonics have had to be fairly tightly locked in before launch. This places onus on the launch platform to develop the track and hold it long enough for the launch sequence to complete. Exposing a launch platform in this fashion can increase risk and defeat the potential for tactical suprise.
The most efecctive technique for getting a missile through a targets defenses is not supersonic or subsonic it is suprise!. Sheffield, Stark, Hanit….all warships that could and should have defeted the missiles fired at them. All hit because they weren’t ready to cope with the threat.
Seeings as modern defensive systems have evolved to cope with supersonic-profile streaming attacks engaging a prepared, contemporary, naval target is a function of simple saturation. Firing more missiles than the target can defeat and decoy. Again as described deploying the, generally, smaller subsonics in volume is a simpler proposition than equivalent volumes of supersonics.
JonesyFlubs,
I see the points being made about subs and i cant help but bash my head off the wall. The Goverment say that about everything, Things are far more capable than ever before. But the things they are missing is that the opposition has not stood still using WW2 tech they too have modernised.
I’m certainly not about to contest the view that the SSN fleet numbers are parlous in the extreme. We need at least 2 more hulls than the numbers being bandied about now. Thats not “nice to have” that is actual need and its for the reasons you accurately note.
The point I am making is this though. If we follow the RN mindset, that the premier antiship platform in the service is the submarine, acting independently and in advance of the surface fleet, and then look around at the deployable target sets that we could even conceivably face up to on the worlds oceans what level of threat is there?. Is there actually right now a, conceivably hostile, deployable surface fleet out there that could withstand the attention of even a single advanced SSN?. The Japanese possibly….but dont count as hostile. The Russians would have to lean on their remaining quality SSN’s for backup and couldnt do it with surface units alone. China and India fall in behind the Russians. Who’s left as a major ASW player?.
Remember what CONQUEROR and just the hint of additional SSN’s in theatre did to the Argentine surface fleet!. IIRC no more than 3 SSN’s were ever active at one time in that theatre of operations and they wound up the opposing surface force as an effective threat.
Grim,
The missile situation could really be addressed but the money isn’t there. Single use drones could partly solve the problem, or enhanced sensors, but if the RN keeps to the mentality that you have to see it to kill it then they’re going to pay dearly if it ever comes to a real fight. The army and RAF don’t seem too bothered, and the sub force seems ok launching TLAMs, so why can’t the surface force deal with Harpoons?
Thats because TLAM is fired against pre-identified targets that dont tend to toddle off of their own volition. The RAF have gone to great lengths to ensure their missiles dont go off on wanderies and massacre busloads of nuns. Hence the dearth of nun-related fatalities laid at their door. The Storm Shadow was even designed to include a fly-off mode in its guidance software such that if, after a few orbits of the target co-ords, it could not scene match the target to that in its database it will clear off to a designated safe area to prevent non-combattant casualties. Virtually everything else they deploy is pretty closely under some form of operator control shortly before target impact. The Army, likewise, tend to have eyes-on in some fashion before they let rip with serious ranged indirect-fire.
Harpoon, and its like, are different propositions in that they have an independent hunting capability. Can better missiles be bought….yes. NSM would be, as per the initial point, such a weapon as would the new variant RBS15 that Radar mentions. The problem is though that these are only now offering the potential for confident employment of OTH indepedent-seeking missile fire…..catch 22 situation. The RN has little faith in antiship missiles compared to HWT’s and are therefore resistant to acquiring the kinds of missiles that may (and I stress may) provide that faith.
Until such a time as that happens the submarine community are happily telling everyone that killing ships is their bag and quoting the tired old analogy that this is achieved, most effectively, by letting water into the bottom of a target ship and not air into the top!. A view that still carries great weight in the mob I believe.
I think eventually it’d be best to combine our SSN and SSBN force (this has been mooted as a cost saving measure). effectively we’d build all our subs as SSBN’s and then have units that we could drop into the missile tubes to make them SSGN’s (like the Ohio’s but quickly interchangeable), so that only a couple are loaded and armed as SSBN’s with the rest in the SSGN role performing the usual SSN roles that a SSBN or SSGN can do perfectly well. I can see significant advantages there some of which we’ve already discussed.
So when an SSN plugs in a speed run to relocate at the rush we give away the location of some of our national deterrent?. Doesnt work that way I’m afraid Grim.
For deterrence you need to be able to provide the assured destruction of your target set. Otherwise what is deterrent about your capability?. There are nuclear targets out there that are protected by ABM’s and ABM technology is becoming ever more available and deployable. To assured-destroy a target so defended you need to be able to provide saturation fire.
It is easily conceivable therefore that a, current, duty Vanguard class bomber might only hold at-risk one well protected city…if you drop the number of missiles per boat, in order to try for a one-size-fits-all ‘SSB(G)N’ you have to use multiple boats in a co-ordinated fashion. Complicated, risky and very likely expensive that one!.
JonesyI think that would be a good idea, the fleet and its assets are changing dramatically over the next few years and if they want to get the most out of them they need to start changing their thought patterns now, or they’ll miss opportunities and chances to make up for shortcomings.
Can’t see it happening to be honest and I’m probably too ingrained with the mentality to be entirely objective unfortunately. The RN doesnt like OTH guided missiles because of the vagueries they bring. You let loose a Harpoon and, realistically, there’s no telling where its going to go. You’re OK if there is only one ship out there or a flotilla of ships that you know are exclusively hostile. That happy situation doesnt extend to many realistic warfare scenarios these days though.
The kind of positive control offered by an SSN with a wire-guided HWT though means that not only are the chances of inadvertent targetting much lesser when you have a platform like an SSN target profiling before launch, but, you can actually steer-off the weapon post-launch until it breaks link.
I appreciate what you are saying about the numbers of subs being depleted, but, by the same margin the number of targets is depleting every bit as quickly. How many surface vessels are left in, for example, the Russian Northern fleet that are worth a Spearfish?. You’d be pushed to find ten deployable at any one time. Likewise for most other developed navies.
JonesyFilling the magazines with one weapon for 3 uses would be an accountants dream. I think it can fill only 2 of those well and that is Ship launched and Air Launched from F-35.
No reason why Lynx Wildcat should necessarily have a problem carrying an air-launched NSM. Surface launched its a 400kg weapon so, minus booster, your into the mid 300’s. Stingray is a circa 300kg weapon and HMA Mk8 happily carries a pair of them. Lynx Wildcat is meant to sport uprated engines giving an uplift in payload according to what I read…so should be no problem if the desire was there. Naturally Merlin would have absolutely no issue deploying the weapon.
As stated its not going to happen – IIRC Sea Skua 2 has already been tipped for FASGW(H) – but I’m absolutely certain Lynx Wildcat and Merlin could both deploy an air-launched NSM.
Jonesybtw imho nsm isn’t the preferable ashm for the royal navy because it is smaller than harpoon and it’s (i)ir only. nsm is more like a successor of pinguin and as such the preferable ashm-missiles for helicopter, some aircrafts (internal load on f-35) and small ships.
but for frigates/destroyers etc. i would prefare a bigger ashm with a dual mode seeker (active radar and iir, maybe completed by a passiv radar seeker/esm) like the rbs-15 mk4. if the rn would use nsm for the merlins it might be possible to prepare the ships for a mixed setup (4 or 8 harpoon/rbs-15/whatever + 8 nsm). this would increase the available number of ashm in a high intensity war and the setup is more flexible.
NSM isnt looking like an option for the RN. Its not, however, because its somehow considered to be too small a weapon. NSM’s range puts it in the same stand-off category as Harpoon or the later block Exocets and its seeker/TRA capability actually makes it a superior littorals weapon than either of those systems.
Antiship missiles have never really taken hold with us and it is still the RN’s cherished view that the best way to sink big ships is with a heavyweight torpedo from a submarine. Little ships can be dealt with via helicopter-launched light AShM’s – in that regard the NSM would seem to be the logical choice for the service!.
Equipping the escorts and filling rotary and fixed-wing air ordnance magazines with the single missile type would obviously appeal to the accountants too. Problem is that there is an apparent distrust of IIR guidance in the RN. Sea Skua 2 is case in point…BAE offered IIR seeker technology for the weapon and RN opted to press on with an active radar head. I’ve never been able to find out why this is the case but it is regardless!.
JonesySounds like a first principles mission statement on a pretty fair religion there Symon!. 🙂
….which raises the second, natural, observation that the discussion point is mans place in the world and wider ramifications yet the mention of divine intervention is cursory at best.
Man 1 God 0?
JonesySounds like a first principles mission statement on a pretty fair religion there Symon!. 🙂
….which raises the second, natural, observation that the discussion point is mans place in the world and wider ramifications yet the mention of divine intervention is cursory at best.
Man 1 God 0?
Jonesy…….but not all of those families share that opinion. Lets be clear about that!
That was the viewpoint of the appointed spokesperson representing the group though. You would assume that such an opinion would have to be view of the majority before it could be presented in the national media?.
Certainly I’ve noted no commentry anywhere that there is a division amongst the UK victims families on this point?.
Do you have information to the contrary Tangmere?.
Jonesy…….but not all of those families share that opinion. Lets be clear about that!
That was the viewpoint of the appointed spokesperson representing the group though. You would assume that such an opinion would have to be view of the majority before it could be presented in the national media?.
Certainly I’ve noted no commentry anywhere that there is a division amongst the UK victims families on this point?.
Do you have information to the contrary Tangmere?.
Jonesy42
Sign In
