Titans Of The Sea

HMS Queen Elizab eth and her sister ship HMS Prince of Wales look set to meet in Portsmouth Harbour this Christmas writes Sebastian Oake

It has been a busy autumn for those aboard the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth. At the end of August, it left its Portsmouth home for the eastern coast of the US for a lengthy exercise involving British fast jets taking off and landing on her deck for the first time.

The deployment, known as Westlant 19, saw seven F-35B Lightning II multi-role stealth strike aircraft, plus Merlin and Wildcat helicopters, tested under realistic war-fighting conditions. Accompanying the carrier were the Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon, also Ports mouth based, the Type 23 frigate HMS Northumberland and the support tanker RFA Tideforce.

It has been an exciting, emotional time for the ship’s company, including commanding officer, Captain Steve Moorhouse. He says: “To command any warship is a privilege but to be able to command HMS Queen Elizabeth during this pivotal phase of her capability development is a real honour. As we increase the scale and complexity of our training and testing, so the potency of this extraordinary ship continues to grow.”

That the Queen Elizabeth is awe-inspiring is without argument and perhaps it should be for £3.1bn. It is 280 metres long – around 27 double-decker buses – and weighs 65,000 tonnes, three times the size of the previous generation of Royal Navy carriers comprising Invincible, Illustrious and Ark Royal. The flight deck is four acres in area – enough to accommodate three football pitches – providing space for 40 aircraft to operate while the ship keeps moving at up to 27 knots. A typical operational strike force might be a mix of 24 F-35Bs and 14 Merlin helicopters, although other helicopters including Wildcat, Chinook and Apache could also be used, depending on the mission.