Much of the admiration for the Sea Harrier is that it was subsonic against supersonic Mirages and Daggers. Much faster adversaries could conceiveably control engagements by using their speed to engage/disengage and get into good firing position.

Against the mach 2 Phantom the Mirage/Dagger would have no such advantage, it would be fast against fast.

I think TSR2 pushed it out of the British govt mindset that they were capable of developing their own first rate combat aircraft. When the Eurofighter came around I doubt the British could get a naval version developed, they lack the national ‘minerals’.

Me too, but I think in peacetime the sqns would be maybe 12-14 Phantoms and 16-18 Buccaneer because there were more of Buccs and they did the buddy tanking. In wartime whatever was at Yeovilton would be jammed onto the carrier decks like in with the Sea Harrier in the Falklands.

The big question is what would be purchased to cover Falklands losses if it was Phantoms and Buccaneers being shot down in 1982 rather than Harrier GR3 and FRS1.

Her sale as a going concern in 1972/3 could pay for a chunk of CVA02, or some other FAA related expense.

IIUC the Conservative govt changed the 1966 decision when it took power in 1970, but didn’t actually do anything about it. For example they didn’t have the last 20 Phantoms re-diverted back to the FAA and decided not to refit the Eagle because the RAF needed her CAG’s Buccaneers.

I didn’t know about the 25 million to turn Hermes into a LPH, thats a lot of money. I don’t know about buying 3 CVAs but I’d certainly think that 2 was possible.

The grossly inflated figure given above for the cancellation of CVA-01 included savings that simply didn’t happen. The aircraft for the carriers (Phantoms and Buccaneers) were bought anyway, but they were given mostly to the RAF were when they were actually needed in 1982, they could only sit impotently on the sidelines. The Invincible class ended up costing per ship about 80% of a CVA to build, though with much lower running costs due to lesser manpower requirements and smaller air groups. The cost of changing a Navy can often wipe out any savings made in the short term.

For me that’s the worst thing, all the blithering on about saving money yet in the event spending enough money that they could have gone through with the programme.

CVA01 was cancelled obstensibly because it cost too much, the RN were quoting 70 million and the Treasury 100 million. But when they cancelled it they then spent 32 million doing a half-baked refit on the Ark Royal and 13 million making the Tiger carry 4 Sea Kings. The Arks refit was done in a marginal constituency where she provided work for 3 years, as opposed to the 6 months and 5 million the Eagles would have cost to last until 1980 or longer. What’s more despite the plan to cap defence spending at 2000 million until 1975 the same labour govt spent 2400 million on defence in its last year in power. So really money wasn’t the issue because 45 million was spent on short lived garbage, dirty party and interservice politics was the problem.