Life aboard Britain’s newest (and largest ever) warship
From his berth on HMS Queen Elizabeth, filmmaker Chris Terrill reveals what life is like on the world’s most modern warship
HMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy, drew cheers and tears from emotional crowds last month when she set sail from Rosyth Dockyard. She was embarking on her first gruelling sea trials and much of what she is now doing is classified, but out here on the high seas I can tell you “Big Lizzie”, as she is now affectionately known, is both beauty and beast combined.
Weighing in at an enormous 65,000 tons, the super carrier is longer than the Houses of Parliament and taller than Nelson’s Column; she is made up of 17million constituent parts; her flight deck is larger than three and a half football fields, her hangar could house 400 doubledecker buses and the total length of her electric cabling and wiring would circle Earth six times.
Costing more than £3 billion, this most modern of aircraft carriers built by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, a consortium of British engineering companies, is so packed with innovation and automation that she can be operated by a much smaller crew than equivalent-sized ships in the US or Russian navies. Yet, despite her many “wow” factors, for me, as an anthropologist, it is the people breathing life into her that I am most interested in.
For the past 18 months, I have been embedded in the ship’s company of 738 men and women as they prepared to take HMS Queen Elizabeth to sea. Living and working among them, I have shared in their excitement as well as their frustrations. Even as we finally “left the wall”, there was still building work to complete and we currently have 300 construction workers sailing with us.
At the helm is Jerry Kyd, the ship’s first seagoing captain. A master navigator, Kyd is also an aircraft carrier man, having commanded both HMS Illustrious and the Ark Royal. As skipper of the country’s first supercarrier (though he prefers the term “strike carrier”), he is also well aware that his ship has much to prove.
The Ministry of Defence, the Admiralty, the Government and, I am told, the Queen herself wait eagerly to see how the nation’s future flagship shapes up.
“This ship is both prototype and finished product at the same time,” says Kyd. “I know we will have problems, but I have no worries because these trials will iron out any issues. What you see here is the best of British maritime engineering manned by the best trained sailors in the world.” Approaching our third week of the six-week trials, the ship and the ship’s company are being tested to the edge of their limits. There is constant training for every contingency: floods, fires, man overboard, explosions, crashes on deck and a terrorist attack.
“Make no mistake about it,” warns Commander Steve Prest, head of Weapons Engineering, “the real world will kick in without warning. A warship is by its nature a dangerous place to be.
“We have fuel, oil, munitions and explosives all contained within a largely high-voltage environment. Add to that landing and take-off of fighter jets and attack helicopters and the possibility of enemy attack, and you begin to understand why we train our men and women to near perfection.”
The ship’s command have also had to fight off spurious claims that the ship is “beset with problems”.
One being that HMS Queen Elizabeth was prone to cyber-attack because, as one critic speculated, her computer system was based on Windows XP – the same as the NHS, which was recently hacked.
This accusation has become a running joke on board, because anything to do with secrecy – and particularly the carrier’s future jet fighter, the F-35B – is strictly compartmentalised and isolated, with a plethora of safeguards to ensure absolute cyber security for these vital weapon systems. Another “shock horror” headline was that the aircraft carrier – or “barecraft carrier” – is devoid of aircraft. Of course it is: the ship is on sea trials at the moment to make sure that she is shipshape and can sail in a straight line. Baby steps.
Only when a multitude of propulsion and mission systems boxes are successfully ticked will the ship become a warship able to take on F-35B Lightning fighters as well as Merlin and Chinook helicopters.
More recently there has been speculation that Big Lizzie would be prone to attack by Chinese sea skimming missiles or could be “sent to the bottom of the sea” without more surveillance aircraft.
“Ridiculous,” says Cdr Euan Stuart, Commander Warfare. “This ship will always be accompanied by a number of escorts, including Type 45 destroyers, the most capable air defence platform in the world.”
Cdr Mark Deller, head of the air-wing, adds: “Without going into details, we are very high tech and will be able to define the field of play we operate in and change the goalposts pretty much at will.”
The ship is an extraordinary place to be, even though I have (more or less) learned my way through the miles of passageways and 3,000 compartments.
Flexing her very considerable muscles in the energetic waters of the North Sea, she has impressed Capt Kyd from the get-go. “She is very responsive to the touch, rock solid and she hardly flexes in the swell,” he said delightedly after our first day at sea. In lay terms, this roughly translates to “she is as nimble as a Ferrari and as robust as a Challenger tank”.
For the first few days we did not exceed 12 knots, but since then Kyd and Scott Maclaren, the assiduous trials manager, put their foot down to see what their charge is capable of. I am not at liberty to tell you what speed she has attained, but for a big girl she can certainly shift.
Many initially complained about the cost of HMS Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship HMS Prince of Wales, which is still in build. The combined cost of both is £6.5billion but this still compares very favourably to the eye-watering $15billion price tag that comes with a single US nuclear carrier (not including the nuclear engine).
Capt Kyd is convinced the nation is getting value for money, and is
‘Chances are, she might have to bare her teeth sooner than expected’
quick to point out: “US carriers are essentially legacy designs, whereas we are a 21st century floating airbase designed for the contemporary digital environment we will be fighting in.”
But while much has been made about the state-of-the-art technology on board, Kyd emphasises still, the most important single resource at his disposal are those men and women (the “Elizabethans”) under his command.
“Without highly trained people to make it work, this is just a gigantic metal box full of wires and gadgetry,” he says.
“A ship to a sailor is a living, breathing organism, which needs understanding and even love.”
On board, there are 200 young ratings who have never been to sea before. Junior Steward Kirsty Rugg is fresh out of training: “Getting this as my first draft was like winning the lottery!”
It’s a view echoed across the company, including from Lt-cdr Bob Hawkins, who has been in the Royal Navy for 39 years, but regards this posting as First Lieutenant “as the pinnacle” of his career.
He says: “This is probably my last job in the Navy, but what a way to go out – helping to put the ‘great’ back in Great Britain.”
Capt Kyd is in no doubt that this ship will be a major player in the international geopolitical game. “HMS Queen Elizabeth will change the way we do business as a major military power,” he tells me.
“It’s all about power projection. We’ll be a maritime force to be reckoned with – not only in terms of conflict but also when it comes to responding to humanitarian disasters”.
On this matter, he is nothing if not pragmatic.
“We live in a troubled world,” he says. “The chances are that HMS Queen Elizabeth might have to bare her teeth sooner than we might expect.
“It is only then that people will fully realise what a gamechanger these carriers will prove to be.”