The former RNZAF ‘Kahu’ Skyhawks are probably the best candidates for expanding the BN A-4 fleet, with the possibility of upgrading the whole fleet to a uniform standard. The RN did consider operating the F-4K from Hermes in the sixties in the AD only role, as she would have been kept on purely as a ‘place holder’ for one of the CVA-01 class. In her air group Buccaneers would have been the primary strike aircraft, so the loss of the Phantom’s bomb load wasn’t a great loss. Yes most of the F-4s still in existence are variants of the land based F-4E, but as I said earlier, the modifications required aren’t that great. Hardpoints on the airframe for catapult spools are common to all variants, and all land based versions have the same arrestor hook as the carrier versions. The undercarriage of the land based Phantoms was modified primarily to cope with use from concrete runways rather than steel decks, but this meant different tyres and brakes. The avionics to be used would be far more problematic if a truly front line airraft was required. The Phantom, suitably updated can still be a formidable AD asset if BVR missiles are used. In the WVR arena it becomes more vulnerable to more modern aircraft.

Buccaneers, yes. Sea Vixen, yes. But Phantoms no (only on Ark Royal R09).

http://www.phantomf4k.org
http://www.seavixen.org

But, to be fair: Hermes cross decking a USN Phantom in the 60s.

If the Brazillians are looking to replace Sao Paolo with a CTOL carrier, there will be nothing suitable on the second hand market in future. The US CVNs are too big and expensive to operate even if they were available, and the conventionally powered CVs recently paid off are also too manpower intensive to be a practical proposition for a nation like Brazil. Given that Brazil’s normal warship purhasing strategy involves buying second hand (Sao Paolo herself was bought for around $15million), a new carrier could be seen as too expensive to contemplate. It doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive though, remember steel is still the cheapest part of any warship design given the high cost of weapon and sensor systems. A Carrier’s main armament is her aircraft, so if the ship’s own systems are kept to a minimum the cost can be controlled. Many take the view that the carrier herself should have as many ‘bells and whistles’ as other warships, but if we restrict the ship to a suite of say three CIWS and a a simple navigation radar as well as an air search radar for control of her own air group, then the costs drop significantly. The resulting carrier will be utterly dependent on her escorts for protection, but that is the case with all carrier navies now anyway.

So, we are looking at a ship that should be considered a ‘floating airfield’ rather than a general purpose warship in it’s own right. It should be a minimum size of 40,000 tonnes, possibly up to 50,000 tonnes depending on the number of aircraft to be operated. The basic hull with machinery and flight deck could be sourced somewhere like South Korea relatively cheaply and constructed quite quickly compared with western and Russian yards. Accepting a degree of compromise between ‘full warship standards’ and commercial standards can bring down initial build costs further, though I wouldn’t suggest adapting a merchant hull design by any means. Propulsion; it needs to drive a 40K hull at a cruising speed of about 18knots for months at a time with sporadic bursts of 25-30knots during flying operations at short notice. Nuclear power is wonderful for this but far beyond our budget. Next would be Gas Turbines, but these can be expensive too and suffer the drawback of requiring volume intensive trunking for the downtakes and uptakes. This can be solved by moving the GTs themselves away from the traditional engine room position into hull sponsons supporting the flight deck and island, and coupling the GTs to generators to supply electricity for electric drive instead of mecanically connecting them to the drive shafts. This also has the benefit of providing a source of power for EMALs if necessary. The cheapest option is commercial large diesel engines, which have the lowest running costs and the lowest manpower requirements. Less suited to rapid accelerations though, so perhaps diesels for normal cruising and some GTDAs for boosting the speed during flying ops? Of course the traditional Steam turbines should be mentioned also, as so many carriers were fitted with them. They suffer the drawback in modern times of being manpower intensive and maintenace heavy also. I’d lean towards two commercial diesel engines for cruising and a GTDA ‘boost’ plant.

Now for the flight deck, the most imporatant part of the ship. If we assume the Brazillians wishh to stay in the CTOL game, then we are talking aquiring cats and traps, currently the former are only in production in one country (USA) whilst the latter are only available from two (USA and Russia). But that’s not the whole story. Britain used to make both, but hasn’t for many decades. The commercial company that made them still exists, McTaggart Scott, and they retain the capacity to manufacture such systems if required. They still make elevators for aircraft carriers (the three Invincibles, RFA Argus, HMS Ocean and the two CVFs) and they manufactured the catapult fitted to the Minas Gerais, for many years Brazil’s sole carrier. The Sao Paolo has two British built BS 5 151ft catapults, parts and maintenance for which are probably sourced with the original manufacturer, so Brazil will already have a working relationship. Of course if steam catapults are selected, from wahtever manufacturer, they will require steam obviously, which the aforementioned diesel plant cannot supply. In the past even steam turbine driven carriers were known to have dedicated boilers specifically for the cats (eg HMS Victorious had two ‘wing’ boilers at the forward end of her machinery spaces specifically for her cats) so a small additional steam plant can be included.

A carrier’s efficiency improves as it’s physical size increases, so efforts to cut costs by cutting the size of the ship are generally counter productive (a major loss of capability for a pitifull financial saving). So now to the main armament, the air group. Legacy Hornets may seem attractive, but es USN/USMC will actually be the least attractive due to their high number of lauch and recovery cycles and little remaining fatigue life. So the preferrable source would be nations who have operated their Hornets sparingly (ie low hours on the airframe). 24-30 aircraft should be sufficient for a frontline sqn, an OCU and attrition reserve. Additionally I’d lean towards S3 Vikings fro several roles, Tanker, COD, ASW and AEW. There are a large number of relatively low hours airframe available and for sale in the US, though their avionics are apparently not so readily available. For AEW a small number of Cerberus systems could be purchased (6 airframes, three for the ship, two fro training and a reserve), Tanker and COD duties could be the easiest to source as the aircraft would be relatively ‘bare’ on delivery to start with, and are already plumbed for tanking pods. The Viking was trialled with weapons like Harpoon successfully as well as other Air to Ground weapons, so could be a useful secondary strike platform/ anti shipping and patrol aircraft. Alternatively Surplus French Super etendards could be aquired, though their remaining fatigue life is also an issue.

OBR – won’t spend a penny: the counterview is that each sovereign State can’t do everything solo, in penny packets. Better if, in Coalition, I specialise in X, you in Y. Since 1950, Japan has never spent >1% of its wealth on Defence, because “we had the US”: UK spent upto 10%. Some, inc. me, would link that differential directly to the erosion of our markets/jobs because UK’s metalworking/engineering innovation was on consumption of, not generation of tax revenue: see useless Allegros, excellent Toyotas.

Attlee’s lot faced greater money-pain than the present lot, yet funded what became RAF Medium Bomber Force plus Strike Carriers Ark, Eagle, Victorious, supported by Albion, Bulwark, Centaur, Hermes (though with merely Attacker/Sea Hawk/Venom, Wyvern, Gannet). Logic in 1947, withdrawal from India, was overwhelming, to abandon all this blue-water stuff, but he saw a Threat, in our valiant recent Ally Uncle Joe beloved of many, even Cabinet colleagues; was very right; so RN could do the business at Korea, Suez. It was Wilson’s second lot that funded CVS/SHAR, so ditto, Falklands. It was Blair’s lot that retained CVS, and enhanced RN’s “independent” SLBM…. because they could see a Sovereign Threat to UK-in-Coalition. Not to UK solo, because we stopped thinking like that in November,1956 (Adm.Leach’s advice that we could retake Falklands solo was on the assumption that UK’s freehold territory of Ascension I. would be available to the Fleet with the assistance of the leaseholder, who would help in other ways, too).

Our present lot are grappling with the balance between UK presence in future coalitions, either in many roles, or in fewer. Not in all roles, nor to try anything heavy, solo. The easy way out, taken since 1998, has been to drift vaguely, shifting dates to the right. FIST and FRES on ground; Astute and SSBN and CVF; A400M, F-35B and/or C, 252 Typhoons, wot about FOAS…Now they’re addressing what they want to spend on Now, for capability to half a century hence. If Cameron’s lot get in next May, they, too, will address same issue. But there is no credible Threat at the level of organised hostile Sovereign – first time in modern history. New paradigm. Doesn’t do to rant here that one piece of kit is central to survival. It’s not. Options, choices, consent of the taxed. Don’t rely, for CVF, on its past the point of no return. Healey chose to tell his loony Left that, when he kept 4 of the 5 Vanguards…but he knew it was a tall tale.

They were Resolution class SSBNs, not Vanguards. You cannot look at the CVFs in isolation as just another defence project, the British Warship building industry’s very survival is predicated on them being completed. Without them, it will mean the loss of tens of thousands of skilled jobs being lost, yards closing and effectively an end to our ability to build warships in future. There is no plan B for the shipbuilders, no other warship design is ready to fill the gap. FSC is several years away from being a viable design. If CVF is cut then the next generation of British Warships will be built abroad, of that there can be no doubt. The incoming Tory Administration will be confronted with the fact that the defence budget has been grossly underfunded, and after more than fifty years of relentless defence cuts there is nothing left that can be cut. The fat went in the 80s, muscle and sinew in the 90s and we are now left with bare bone. If money has to be cut at all it should be by withdrawal from the ‘Stan. If we aren’t going to fund the operation properly then we should pull out altogether and stop wasting the lives of our service personnel. That would be the stark choice I would present to Cameron, ‘put up or shut up’. You can’t fight wars on a shoestring. We can afford much more than we are at present, as so much is squandered elsewhere (ID cards anyone? £18billion? What about axing the Quangos…).

Great color pictures of the Bonnie, Obi. It is a shame that we got rid of our carrier. I wish Canada had taken more of an intrest in naval aviation.

During the Korean war we didn’t send our carrier to that theater. We had troops but know naval air support. We had the Magnificent at the time, but I think it might of had something to do with her being on loan and not wanting to put her in harms way.

I know on other forums they say Canada doesn’t need to have carriers because we have the United States. But i’m sure any extra help with carrier rotation would be appreciated.

Voodoo

Quite so. I have often been irritated by those who state member nations of Nato should leave things like carriers to the US, because that’s the start of the slippery slope. Soon it will be just about everything else defence related (eg combat aircraft, MBTs, Air Defence Destroyers etc) that is expensive to buy and run that can be consigned to the ‘we don’t need to buy our own, the Yanks can defend us with theirs’ school of thought. Once you start down that path sooner or later the Americans might just think to themselves ‘Why should we risk our lives for these losers who won’t spend a penny to defend themselves?’. During the 70s the RN was down to one carrier, on it’s own of marginal value due to providing carrier strike capability for only part of the time, but it was justified as being a contribution to the NATO strike carrier force, so was a way of ‘shouldering the burden’ alongside the US. They appreciated it greatly, far beyond any material contribution the ship made.

Bonnie may have only been one carrier, but she was one of many in NATO and she symbolised the Canadian committment to her allies. Her withdrawal was equally symbolic and a great shame too.

Do we have a breakdown of costs to explain where the extra £1 billion pounds is needed? I have a feeling a lot of it will be down to government changing the design and putting the inservice and construction date back. I just can’t see they could under estimate building 2 carriers by as much as £1 billion. We haven’t even starting building yet and i had thought that going by recent projects cost over runs that there would be a bit of CVF but not £1 billion. I have a horrible feeling we could see the cost going up by another £500 million before the ships are in service. But that would be easier to live with if there was actually 2 ships nearly complete. Also putting the construction off for a few years will raise costs no matter what. Its simple, in 3 years things will not be as cheap as they were cause of inflation. Also wages go up. All this may not be much but it does add up.

We have started building. 1SL and the Princess Royal attended the official first steel cutting ceremony a week or two back. The extra £1Billion cost is almost entirely due to the Government ordered extension of the building period. If they had kept to the original schedule we would only be hearing about a cost increase of £100-£200million by now, hardly worth reporting. Think about it, they are going to have to keep the yards and tens of thousands of skilled workers on this project for another two or three years over what they had budgeted for. Annual payments go down, but the overall cost goes up. Try the same thing with your mortgage and see what happens.:eek:

ROFLMAO. They already have 2 or 3 Kiev class carriers on top of Varyag don’t they?

Kiev herself and Minsk were both sold to China to become tourist attractions in the 90s. Novorossiysk, the third ship was scrapped in 97 in South Korea and the fourth has been sold to India…

There were reports that the Reagan administration in the early 80s offered two Essex class to the PRC, during the period when America was hoping to use China for leverage against the USSR. The deal fell through when inspections of the proposed ships showed they had deteriorated seriously after ten or more years in reserve, and they had been extensively stripped for parts to keep USS Lexington in service. A great ‘what if’ though…