Obi Wan RussellIv read that the air group on CVA-01 would have consisted of 18 Phantoms, 18 Bucs, and 4 Gannets…………seems they could either go to two 18 plane squadrons or perhaps threee 12 plane ones for, say, 12 Phantoms and 24 Bucs………..just a thought.
The original order for F-4K Phantoms for the RN was around 140, more than enough for three 18 aircraft frontline sqns, an HQ sqn (800 series for trials and advanced training) and an OCU (700 series for basic type training). When CVA-01 was cancelled this was cut back to 48 to provide enough for Eagle, Ark Royal and a training sqn, but the RN only found out Eagle would not be Phantomised when the last 20 were delivered in RAF camouflage. 84 Buccaneers were ordered/delivered prior to 66, but more were expected to be ordered in due course.
The Bucc production line didn’t close until 1977, and an extra 43 S2s were ordered for the RAF in the late 60s. Remember the extra aircraft would not have been needed for the RN immediately, the three new carriers were scheduled to enter service in 72, 78, and 84. The RAF also ordered around 118 more Phantoms which were basically de navalised FG1s (they lacked the FG1s slotted stabilators, catapult hooks were left off and the extra extensible nose wheel was replaced with the standard unit from the F-4C). In essence we did buy all the aircraft we needed for the new carriers, we just gave them to the wrong service.
Obi Wan RussellIn the RN the distinction has for half a century primarily been decided by role rather than size alone, Cruisers were large command vessels capably of deploying anywhere in the world without escorts (big enough and tough enough to look after themselves). Apart from the three Tigers, the eight County class were effectively light cruisers, but were lumbered with the Destroyer designation to get them past the Treasury. The Type 42 destroyers were on a par with most contemporary Frigates when built, but in the RN a Destroyer is and Anti Air Warfare vessel (ie has an Area Defence missile system) whilst a Frigate is a general purpose escort with an Anti Submarine Warfare bias and point defence AAW capability only. Simply put, fit an area defence SAM system on a frigate and it becomes a destroyer.:rolleyes::eek::D
Obi Wan RussellI read somewhere that perhaps the final 2 County DLGs were to be reordered as Type 82s, but in the malestrom of 1966 weren’t. Is that a myth?
Also I’ve read that in the 500 million figure for cancelling CVA01 (which also included a second carrier, aircraft including Phantom and a new AEW) the govt included 8 type 82s when the RN actually only planned 6 at that stage.
Whilst the Type 82s were developed from the County class the final design was far removed from it’s origins. So whereas the final three Whitby class frigates could be reordered as Leanders, the same could not be done with the final two Counties. I think the final pair were simply too far along in the planning stage to make the change without significant delays. In 66 anything connected to the Carriers including the type 82s, the new type 988 radar, the older type 984 for examples were seen as politically unacceptable. There was a great deal of throwing the ‘baby out with the bathwater’. The whole saga smacks of one really bad decision leading to a whole host of others that shouldn’t have been made.
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.
Obi Wan RussellThis is for Obi and is also off topic….
I really like reading and look forward to your posts. They are very informative and well thought out. I hope you contribute more to this forum as I don’t see you enough on here.
Thank you. I’d post more often but real life tends to get in the way a lot! Also I believe if you have nothing useful to add, best keep your trap shut and maintain a dignified silence!;):D
Obi Wan RussellThis is for obi and its kinda off the topic, but how many Type 82s were planned?
At the time they were cancelled there were four type 82s on order, only Bristol was built mainly to avoid redundancies at the shipyard but also to provide a test ship for several new systems coming in to service, Sea Dart, type 909, Ikara, and her gas turbines. The latter proved their worth when her steam plant was badly damaged by fire shortly after commissioning and for a while she ran as a gas turbine only ship. My guess is had the CVA project gone ahead there would have been a second batch of four as with the preceding County class, which in effect they would have replaced. The type 82s cost about £30million in mid 60s prices, and the replacement type 42s were specified to provide the same AAW capability for just £20million, and this cost cutting obsession was responsible for most of the T42s faults. They did however have the advantage of being affordable in numbers, 14 in all, and these ships could be (and were) upgraded later.
Obi Wan RussellCVA01 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.
The treasury price of £100million was misleading because it included type 82 DLGs as well as support costs rather than just the cost of a single carrier. Under the plan for the CVA class, both Ark and Eagle would have been ‘Phantomised’ anyway, Ark’s refit was planned long before the 66 ‘Healy Axe’. The political angle to Ark’s refit was not that it was approved, but that it wasn’t cancelled. Healy still planned that after a three year refit she would only serve for two years than pay off. The refit had always been intended to keep her viable up to 1980 if need be. Ark’s refit was always going to bring her to a less extensive configuration than Eagle (no new island, no type 984 CDS, no major overhaul of her machinery etc) because she was intended to be a stopgap until CVA-02 entered service. Eagle’s Phantomisation would have only take six months (planned for her 1968 refit) so we would have three phantom capable carriers deployed with the fleet by 72 (theoretically) Hermes would have been retained as a CTOL carrier (with Sea Vixens) into the mid 70s again as a stop gap to cover deployments, after which around 75-76 she would have again been offered to Australia (first offered in 66-68) and given HMAS Melbourne’s increasingly apparent decrepitude the Australian government may have looked more favourably on the deal.
CVA-01 was supposed to complete in 1972 replacing Victorious (given average shipbuilding delays of the time she would probably have commissioned in 1974), CVA-02 was scheduled to enter service in 1974-76 (my guess is again slightly later,78) replacing Ark Royal and CVA-03 was planned for 1984 replacing Eagle. Denis Healy himself has said the plan never dropped below three ships as this was the minimum number needed to maintain one carrier forward deployed to a combat zone. The current two carrier plan is only about keeping one carrier available to deploy at all times.
Obi Wan Russell[QUOTE=hjelpekokk;1980721] Please retire all your seakings as soon as posible and send them all as spare part to our (Norwegian) SAR seakings! New sar helicopter still not choosen :'(
Best helicopter we have ever had, but its old, and difficult to get spares.
[QUOTE]
We have half of our retired about half of our Sea King Fleet, the HAS6 models which were replaced in the fleet ASW role by Merlin HM1s over a decade ago. Most have been reduced to spare parts now to keep the rest (RAF HAR3s, RN HC4s, HU5s and ASaC7s) flying. Put in a bid now to cannibalise what’s left when they leave service!
Obi Wan RussellSounds like the UK delegation were on a sales mission.
How much commonality in a design could there be though when the two navies will in all likelihood want to use different propulsion and weapons systems and sensors? Would the UK be willing to buy into the Aus run but (Aus+US) funded AUSPAR program, for example?
I would say no, it’s not weapons and sensors that will be common to both navies, just the hull and propulsion primarily. The weapons and sensor fits will hopefully be modular, so they can be fitted almost on a ‘plug and play’ basis. The RAN will have their preferred weapons/sensors and we will have ours, at the moment RN ships will recieve some legacy systems from the type 23s (post modernisation), including Artisan Radar and sonar type 2087.
Obi Wan RussellPerhaps some struggle between a group of Mistral proponents and a group of proponents of nuclear cruiser reactivation within the navy?
I don’t doubt there will be an element of that in the background, but I think it more likely that the Russians have realised just how far behind they are in shipbuilding techniques. The plan was to build the first two in France, with the French Shipyard providing technical assistance including training to the Russian shipyard staff so that they could press ahead with hulls three and four in the Russian yard. The first two are still proceding on time and will enter service as planned, but the Russianpair are being delayed because they realise they will need more time to bring their own shipbuilding capability into line with the French yards, and this it has to be said was the main reason for the deal. Being able to build modern warships to modern standards matters more than a couple of amphibs in the grand scheme of things.
Obi Wan RussellWhy didnt anyone try a combo of catapult & ski jump ?
No and for a very good reason. You leave the end of the sk jump at 80 knots. Yo leave the end of a catapult in excess of 130 knots. The change of vector caused by the ramp puts a lot of stress on the nose gear of an aircraft, which is why you don’t go off the ramp any quicker than that. You’d rip the nose gear to pieces. If you can reach 130 knots before leaving the deck you don’t need the ski jump.
A jet fighter that needs 1000ft of flat deck to reach takeoff speed from a standing start still needs 1000 ft of roll to reach flying speed, it’s just that if you place a ski jump halfway along that roll then you get it off the deck and on an upward trajectory before it is truly flying. It continues on this arc and would otherwise drop back to earth/sea but for the fact it is still accelerating due to jet thrust, so when it reaches the apogee of the arc it will have reached flying speed. That’s how ski jumps work, they give you a 1000ft takeoff roll in 500ft (figures for illustrative purposes only) of deck with the second 500ft of the roll in the air in front of the carrier. To put it another way, a conventional takeoff is 1. start takeoff roll (fire catapult), 2. reach takeoff speed, 3. Leave the ground/deck and fly.
With a ski jump, yo do it this way round: 1. Start takeoff roll, 2. Leave the deck via the ramp, 3. reach takeoff speed several hundred feet in front of the carrier (and about 200 ft above sea level).
Have a think about it and you’ll understand why there will never be a combined ski jump/catapult. The aircraft’s engine(s) provide all the acceleration needed. If you want max fuel and weapons to leave the deck then there is no alternative to the catapult.
Obi Wan RussellIIRC that 4 minute warning was, as you say, based on Soviet ICBMs launched from Soviet territory, & didn’t take into account SLBMs launched from different directions & shorter distances (early Soviet SLBMs had to be launched from shorter distances, due to their range). The survivability of a V bomber force sitting on the ground looked increasingly problematical when SLBMs came along.
I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the crew of a Soviet submarine surfacing to launch SSN-4s within 600 km of the V bomber bases, but I doubt there’d have been four minutes warning. Sub-surface launched SSN-5s were in service from 1963, with 1300 km range. Still less than four minutes warning, I reckon. Hence the V bomber force needed to change to continuously airborne to remain survivable, or be replaced by something less vulnerable. It was replaced.
JohnK ignores all this.
I agree completely, the four minute warning became apparent at the start of the sixties several years after the V-Force entered service, and the 90 second QRA was the best it could do in response. Previously, before the ICBM/SLBM threat the Bombers were to launch in response to Soviet Bombers being inbound to the UK and other NATO states. It was a much more leisurely pace by comparison. The deterrent had to evolve in response to an evolving threat, so in the 50s jet bombers (RAF) could match jet/turbo prop bombers (Soviet), in the early sixties, those same RAF bombers could just about offer an adequate response to Soviet ICBMs, but the threat from SLBMs launched much closer to the UK (in order to reeduce our response time as much as possible and try to catch our bombers on the ground or still within lethal range of their own vapourising air bases) meant the large nuclear bomber became obsolete and no longer provided any survivable second strike capability. SSBNs do provide this capability then and now.
Skybolt was obsolete before it entered service, and the Americans realised this just in time I have no doubt that it could have been made to work within it’s design parameters just fiine, but it was based on a concept that was no longer viable, because the bombers that carried them could not be guaranteed to survive a Soviet first strike. The existing V-Force of the sixties was large enough to support ground based QRA, but once keeping bombers on the ground becomes untenable, you have to switch to permanent airborne bombers patrolling ‘ready to go’ like the USAF B-52s et al. The numbers needed to support this posture are much larger, and as was stated previously has to include a large tanker force to keep them airborne. It just become unaffordable, and large subsonic bombers cannot provide any guarantee penetrating Soviet airspace even to the launch points of Skybolt against Soviet supersonic interceptors. SLBMs win this argument every time, there is still to this day no effective countermeasure against SSBN based deterrence, whereas Bombers are just big slow targets.
Obi Wan Russell72 Vulcans. Think for a moment: how many effective aircraft is that? And what damn use would they be against a Soviet first strike? How many could we keep continuously airborne (especially without any extra tankers)? How much would that continuous patrol cost?
You said the Polaris force was a loss of capability compared to 200+ V-bombers, & now you say that we’d only have had 72. Can’t you at least try to be consistent? BTW, don’t forget when Skybolt was cancelled.
The V-Force deterrent wasn’t based on continuous airborne patrol, it was based on keeping (IIRC) four bombers at each base on QRA, ready to launch in 90 seconds from the lauch order. Remember the ‘four minute warning’? that was based on our land based radar stations being able to detect an incoming Soviet ICBM attack as it crested the Horizon. At whih point we would have four minutes until they hit the UK (The USA would have half an hour from that point). Pilots and crew would be sat in the cockpits for hours at a time with the aircraft ready to start very quickly (a single switch in the cockpit would start all four engines) and as I said earlier the time from alert to lift off was around 90 seconds. That gave the aircraft a cople of minutes to clear the lethal zone around their own air base before the ‘buckets of instant sunshine’ arrived.
The whole point of second strike deterrence is to guarantee that your retaliation will not be destroyed by the enemie’s first strike. Land based weapons like the V-Force and missiles in silos have a degree of survivability in this case but sea based deterrence (SSBNs / CASD) take the survivability of the retaliation capability to a whole new level. Overall the costs of CASD are still lower than a bomber force, and that’s why we switched ultimately. The four boat R-class Polaris Programme is still one of the few postwar UK defence programmes that came in on time and budget.
Obi Wan Russellso true, and yet we so many navies make the same single carrier mistake – brazil, russia, india, france, etc.
why do they all make the same mistake? a navy should have at least two carriers or no carriers.
Cost. Most of those Navies wanted the prestige of a carrier, but could only afford the one. Ideally you need three ships to guarantee one ‘on station’, ie one in the front line, a second in refit post deployment and a third working up post refit pre deployment. A two ship cycle only guarantees one ship available to deploy at all times, ‘on call’ in current jargon with the second in refit/on leave/ in training.
Obi Wan RussellTwo other thoughts on this would be on smaller ships the Skyhook concept and secondly could a cat launch be combined with a ski ramp for the 1154 or would this have been too risky a combination and restricted the use of any carriers for conventional aircraft as was seen with the recent carriers being specifically for the SHars and choppers?
The problem with Skyhook, and the main reason why it has never been used is that once you have a ship large enough to support the minimum number of operationally useful aircraft (about six, enough for a round the clock two aircraft CAP), that ship will be big enough to support a conventional flight deck and ski jump, as you are effectively into ‘Chakri Narubet/Garibaldi’ territory. Look at any of the concept drawings of skyhook ships, and they all feature a conventional heli deck aft; Harriers have been landing on escort sized heli decks for decades (or at least had the capability to do so). If you can land on the helipad why do you need skyhook?
Also Cats and Ski jumps really fall into the category of either/or; If you are going to the expense of fitting a cat then you may as well fit the full sized one and get your aircraft off the deck at full flying speed (130+knots). A ski jump gets you off the deck a lot slower (80+knots) but gives you more time to achieve flying speed before you fall into the sea. Try to go up a ski jump at 130+knots and the compression on the nosewheel oleo will inflict severs damage.
Obi Wan RussellFascinating, I didn’t realise they intended to use a catapult assisted take off. Interesting to see the American style nose gear launch bar.
The P1154RN was intended to replace the Sea Vixen as the Fleet’s air defence fighter. There was no intention at the time to operate it from anything other than Fleet Carriers (both existing and CVA class) so it would make best use of existing facillities, including catapults. It would have been capable of free takeoffs, but as with other STOVL types it would have had payload restrictions, so it made sense to make it catapult capable to get off the deck with max payload and fuel. The only sea going experience with STOVL aircraft at the time was the P1127 trials aboard Ark Royal in 1963, and the most impressive aspect of these (to the Navy) would have been concerned with landing aboard as opposed to takeoffs. Even the Sea Vixen could make free takeoffs from a carrier (albeit using almost the whole deck length and little payload) but landing on was always (and to this day also) a risky business even with the angled deck. P11154RN offered conceptually the best of both worlds, catapult launch to get the plane in the air with full fuel load and max weapons load, then the aircraft could be recovered vertically like a Harrier at the end of it’s sortie. CATOVAL, if you like, concepually the opposite of STOBAR which I have always viewed as the worst of both worlds (limited takeoff performance and all the dangers of hitting the deck at flying speed praying for a hook-up with the wire).
The Americans were beginning to use the nose tow catapult launch method in the 60s and it made sense to incorporate this into the P1154RN from the start. The P1154RN would alsop have been able to operate from existing RN carriers without modification (unlike the F-4 Phantom), but the increasing weight of the aircraft during development was it’s real downfall, necessitating the use of plenum chamber burning (PCB, effectively an afterburner fitted to the forward cold air nozzles to increase thrust) during landings and vertical takeoffs. The Hawker test pilots who had flown the P1127 knew this would cause horrendous damage to whatever they had to land on and the aircraft itself due to FOD and are on record as stating they were happy to use PCB in level flight, but never vertically.
One wonders if given the reduced size and weight of modern avionics compared to the 60s, as well as lighter construction materials, a modern day rendition of the P1154 could solve those problems and not require PCB in the vertical mode. In any case, it is a shame the aircraft never made it at least to the flying prototype stage as it’s contemporary the TSR2 did.
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