One proper carrier
SIR – Sir Peter Luff (Letters, August 31) is, I would suggest, missing the point when he leaps to the defence of the procurement of the Royal Navy’s two large aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.
Frankly, without catapults and arrestor gear (“cats and traps”), these warships are no more than “through deck cruisers”, albeit somewhat larger than the former Invincible class, HMS Invincible, HMS Illustrious and HMS Ark Royal.
Today’s though deck cruisers, like their predecessors, carry helicopters, together with the fifth-generation fighter, the F35B – which, with its vertical or short take-off and landing (VSTOL) capability (an added complexity that affects aircraft performance), is intended to replace the VSTOL AV-8B Harriers deployed by the US Marine Corps on their Waspclass amphibious assault ships. If, in 2010, the admirals, civil servants and politicians, including the minister for defence equipment, had worn their thinking caps, they would have emulated the French and ordered just one “proper” aircraft carrier, nuclearpowered and with cats and traps.
Now, 12 years later, the Navy would have an aircraft carrier (perhaps with two crews for extended time at sea) capable of carrying a full air wing, including the F35C (much more capable than the F35B and ordered by the US Navy), the F-18 Super Hornet (for strike missions and air-to-air refuelling) and the E-2 Hawkeye (for airborne early warning), together with a squadron of anti-submarine warfare helicopters.
Sqn Ldr James A Cowan (retd)
Durham
SIR – Sir Bernard Gray’s account of why the Royal Navy’s new carriers, Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, were procured with a short take-off and vertical landing capability accords with what Sir Peter Luff said.
However, at the end of his piece, Sir Bernard states that “the electromagnetic system [Emals, being developed by the US] won’t be launching F-35s from US ships until at least 2025.”
I’m afraid he is wrong. Emals is fitted to the new US nuclear carrier Gerald R Ford (CVN 78). Although the ship has suffered huge development problems, not least with Emals, to date she has achieved 10,000 catapult launches (including of F-35Cs) without mishap.
The problem has been with the “mean time between failures” of the equipment (reaching only about half of the designed target). The US Navy says it expects CVN 78’s first operational deployment to be “some time in 2022”.
Wg Cdr Bob Crane (retd)
Huntingdon