Flying high

The Kremlin took aim this week at the new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth which has been built for the Royal Navy. “The British aircraft carrier is just a convenient oversized target at sea . For that reason, it is in the interests of the British royal navy not to show off the ‘beauty’ of its aircraft carrier on the high seas any closer than a few hundred miles to its Russian ‘distant relative’ (the Russian aircraft carrier).” The Queen Elizabeth left Rosyth earlier this week to start sea-trials. Apart from the Russian attack rather unusually the Royal Navy kept the whole event rather low key. After fighting to keep the Queen Elizabeth clear of savage defence cuts for many years the Royal Navy decided that its biggest ever warship should just put to sea with little pomp or ceremony. Now, granted there will be a christening ceremony and of course an enormous party is planned when she sails into her home port of Portsmouth next year. But still, it was a low key event. Now, the Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship Prince of Wales are not popular. They have costs many billions of pounds and some say they are far too big for modern-day warfare. Now obviously this is not the case. All of the leading naval powers have aircraft carriers and the Queen Elizabeth is “small” compared to her U.S. counterparts. The problem is that the Queen Elizabeth still doesn’t have any aircraft...in other words she has no “teeth.” The U.S. made F35 jets are still in the production stage and it will be at least two or even three years before the Queen Elizabeth is fully operational. This will mean that her planning, construction and sea-trials have taken almost fifteen years. The wait is now almost over the Royal Navy but with more defence cuts on the horizon I doubt that the carrier will ever have her full compliment of aircraft. But having said all that the Royal Navy and British ship-building deserve praise for the carrier.