The Royal Navy Only Has 26 Combat Vessels (And Is Now Killing-Off Its Only Aircraft Carrier)

Robert Beckhusen

Security,

HMS ‘Illustrious’ heads for the scrapyard.

HMS Illustrious, the last of the Royal Navy’s Invincible-class carriers, has set sail from Portsmouth to meet her doom at a Turkish scrapyard.

The British government chose to sell her for scrap in 2014, but Illustrious’ final journey nonetheless signals the end of an era during a low point for the shrinking Royal Navy. Illustrious was the second Invincible class between HMS Invincible and Ark Royal, scrapped in 2011 and 2013, respectively.

The carriers were products of the Cold War, as Britain designed them primarily to hunt Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic with their on-board complement of up to 22 helicopters of various types. Fixed-wing Harrier jets, taking off with the aid of a ski-jump ramp, provided extra firepower and defense from enemy aircraft.

While they were technically carriers by any reasonable definition, these 22,000-ton vessels were significantly lighter than the 100,000-ton Nimitz-class supercarriers of the U.S. Navy. A better proxy would be the Russian Kiev-class carriers — only one which survives today in Indian Navy service.

The Invincible class also had similarities to U.S. Adm. Elmo Zumwalt’s design for a small, practical “Sea Control Ship” that would protect convoys from submarines and air attack.

Invincible would serve during the Falklands War in 1982. Illustrious, which launched in 1978 and was still undergoing trials when Argentina invaded the islands, did not. But the war caused the Royal Navy to rush her into service, and she relieved her sister ship in the South Atlantic a few months after Argentina’s defeat

Illustrious largely lived out the ’80s as an anti-submarine vessel patrolling in the Atlantic. In 1986, her gearbox exploded and caught the ship on fire for several hours — the vessel was nearly lost. In the ’90s, she sailed in the Adriatic Sea and Persian Gulf aiding no-fly zones over Bosnia and Iraq.

In 2000, she supported a British task force that dropped 600 soldiers into Sierra Leone, helping save Freetown from falling to an army of marauding child soldiers.