When is an Aircraft Carrier...

[DaveB]

When the carriers become helicopter platforms.. they get a nice red and blue 'Combined Ops' badge on the fwd funnel/main mast.. somewhere it can be seen. I think a carrier 'toppers' with Apache's would be kinda cool.. especially if we had enough to fill one

ATB
DaveB

[SkippyBing]

I thought the Apches were used only by the Army and this is a Navy ship.

Apache was operating off Ocean for the affair in Libya last year, if you want to blow up things on the land it's a bit more useful than a Merlin. There's nothing to stop Army or Air Force assets operating off a carrier*, you just have to get used to the sight of lost Pongos and Crabs wandering around the place.

*Okay, there is but once you've done all the trials they normally find ways around most things.

[Chris Trott]

The USAF and US Army Helicopters frequently "bum a ride" from the Navy's flat tops (whether they be the big girls or the little Assault Carriers) to get long distances when they want to move a bunch of helos without having to pack them down for shipping on C-5 Galaxies or they're not in a super fast rush. Don't know that any of our guys have recently operated off a Navy ship, but that's more of a "haven't the need".

What you guys need to do is buy a bunch of AH-1Z Super Cobras for the Royal Marines to make due and escort the Merlins until your JSF's arrive.


BTW, the two inner "Sidewinders" are actually the AGM-122 Sidearm Anti-Radiation missiles. It's odd that they are in the picture as we have no AGM-122's left in inventory, only the training missiles like the ones pictured.

[Paul K]

I didn't think the Illustrious was still in service. I thought she'd been decommissioned like the other two.

[TobyV]

I must say I don't understand our equipment policies. 20 yerars ago, we had Tornado GR.1s, Jaguars, Harrier GR.5/7s and Buccaneers (and Phantoms?) all capable of delivering air to ground ordnance, which looks like more than duplication. Only the Harrier was capable of being carrier launched (with the carriers we had available) but now they get rid of that in favour of the Tornado (which from memory performed the most poorly out of all the aforementioned in the 1st Gulf war)? I read recently some in the RAF would have sooner got rid of the Phantoms and gone to a Eurofighter/Harrier based RAF which to me makes more sense, although I believe there are difficulties with the air-to-ground capabilities of the Eurofighter?

[Chris Trott]

Couple of things -

1) Harrier by far has the highest loss rate of all the airframes and the highest loss risk (single engine, VSTOL). The USMC is the only one who's mostly gotten the problems under control, but the Harriers that were in RAF/RN service were never brought up to the same standards and modifications made that made the USMC aircraft safer.
2) The Tornado GR.4/GR.4A was specifically designed to fix the problems the GR.1/GR.1A had during the first Gulf War. As far as I'm aware, it has.

[TobyV]

Hi Chris,

I agree with you about the Tornado upgrade, although one could ask if the GR.4A can do anything that the Eurofighter will not (someday) be able to do? My other point was that the Harrier was the only fixed-wing capability we had after the retirement of Ark Royal IV. As regards losses, I looked up the stats on Wikipedia. There were a lot with the GR.1/GR.3 and equivalent AV-8A, although both the British and American versions of AV8-B/Harrier II/GR.5/7/9 seem to suffer a much lower incident rate. Some things like bird ingestions and collisions could happen to any aircraft. Obviously the nature of VSTOL operation is going to be inherantly higher risk than conventional take off/landing regarding pilot error and also the effect of things like engine failures. I don't see incident rate alone as a good reason for us at least to have got rid of the Harrier versus any other type we were operating.

[SkippyBing]

Basically the choice was get rid of Harrier or Tornado to save money, Typhoon not being an option.

Harrier couldn't carry the full range of stores Tornado could, notably Storm Shadow, sure you could integrate them on to the Harrier but that would cost and we're trying to save money.

There are more Tornadoes than Harriers, something like 140 vs 67 so by the time you've deployed some to Afghanistan on top of normal commitments there's virtually nothing left of the Harrier fleet, seriously they didn't do any proper deployments on a carrier for the time they were out there. With Tornadoes there's theoretically more to task. Although if you send them to Afghan you may lose more than you planned in take-off/landing accidents.

Those were the two main drivers, as Joint Force Harrier was under 1 Group and therefore only really jointly manned rather than a true joint asset the ability to fly off a carrier wasn't a major consideration.