HMS Amazon (F169): The Fire That Exposed a Whole Class's Weakness

The First of a New Breed

HMS Amazon has the distinction of being the lead ship of the Royal Navy's Type 21 frigate class, a design built to commercial shipbuilding standards to keep costs and construction times down. Built by Vosper Thornycroft in Southampton, her keel was laid on 6 November 1969, she was launched by Princess Anne on 26 April 1971, and she finally entered service on 11 May 1974, at a cost of £16.8 million. She was a fast, capable frigate, powered by gas turbines to a top speed of 30 knots and armed with a 4.5-inch gun, Sea Cat missiles and a helicopter, representing the Navy's latest thinking in general-purpose frigate design.

A Fire That Revealed a Real Weakness

In June 1977 Amazon took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead, a proud showcase moment for the Royal Navy's newest class of frigate. Only months later, in November 1977, she suffered a serious engine room fire near Singapore that turned into a genuinely important lesson for the entire Type 21 class. The fire got hot enough that ladders made of aluminium alloy, used extensively in the ship's construction to save weight, actually melted. It was a stark, practical demonstration of one of the design's real vulnerabilities, and helped confirm concerns that would later be reinforced by the loss of other lightly built frigates in far more serious circumstances during the Falklands War, prompting the Navy to rethink how much aluminium belonged in a warship's structure.

A Coral Reef and a War She Missed

Amazon added a further scrape to her record in December 1980, striking a coral pinnacle off Belize, and by the time the Falklands War broke out in 1982 she was on deployment in the Persian Gulf rather than the South Atlantic, missing the conflict that would go on to define so much of her sister ships' reputations, for better and for worse.

Like other Type 21s, she suffered from hull cracking through the mid-1980s and underwent major refitting, with steel plating reinforcing her structure and four Exocet anti-ship missile launchers added to sharpen her offensive punch.

A Long Second Career as PNS Babur

Amazon was decommissioned on 30 September 1993 and sold to Pakistan, recommissioned as PNS Babur with pennant number D-182. The Pakistan Navy modified her armament and radar systems and kept her in active service for more than two decades, finally retiring her in December 2014 after 22 years of Pakistani service, a second career considerably longer than the nineteen years she had originally spent under the White Ensign. As the ship that led an entire class into service and then helped expose one of its more serious design flaws in the process, Amazon's career was, in its own way, exactly the kind of practical, occasionally uncomfortable education that every new class of warship has to go through.