HMS Queen Elizabeth, the UK Royal Navy’s 65,000-tonne flagship aircraft carrier, has returned to Portsmouth Harbour after only four months of maintenance at Rosyth Dockyard in Scotland.
It is said that she will return to operational duties in the autumn of 2024.
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The carrier arrived in Rosyth in March of the same year for “unscheduled work in dry dock to her shaft lines,” said the service.
She emerged sooner than initially forecast from repairs and, after sailing under the Forth Bridges, had spent a week at sea, where the Navy put her through trials to test the systems to the maximum extent.
This included marine engineering trials, sailing at high speed for extended periods of time and manoeuvring as aggressively as possible to give the command team full confidence in her systems following the docking period.
While testing her systems, the ship has also been carrying out a wide variety of training, including boat drills, damage control exercises and intelligence briefings to get sailors and officers back up to speed after their time in Rosyth.
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By GlobalData
Royal Air Force P-8 Maritime Patrol Aircraft from RAF Lossiemouth worked closely with the aircraft carrier, while sailors took advantage of the good weather in the North Sea to do maintenance to the upper deck.
To get the carrier back to sea has been a joint effort between the Royal Navy, Defence Equipment & Support – the government’s defence procurement arm – and Babcock, one of Britain’s foremost naval contractors.
“Whilst no warship wants to find itself spending unscheduled time out of the water, I am enormously proud of the work that has gone on in Rosyth,” said the Commanding Officer of HMS Queen Elizabeth, Captain Will King.
Enduring problems
On 3 February 2024, the service confirmed that HMS Queen Elizabeth would not lead Nato navies in a maritime exercise as part of the wider Steadfast Defender all-domain exercise – the largest since the Cold War – which began later that week. This was due to “routine pre-sailing checks” undertaken on 2 February had identified “an issue with a coupling on [HMS Queen Elizabeth] starboard propellor shaft”.
Its sister ship HMS Prince of Wales, itself had just returned to sea following its own propellor shaft issues, went on to take her sister’s place.
Furthermore, the flagship now faces air navigation obsolescence, according to a UK defence contract calling for solutions. According to the notice released in May 2024, the government will formally approach bidders in November 2024.
Tactical Air Navigation acts as a beacon providing aircraft with information on relative bearing and distance to the ship while DF gives air traffic controllers information on the bearing of aircraft from the ship based upon their radio transmissions.
This problem may account for the fact that the Prince of Wales will, once again, take over her duties in a Carrier Strike Group to Japan that the former Conservative government announced would occur in 2025.
