HMS Ark Royal (R07): The Last of a Storied Name to Wear the Flag

The Last of Her Class

HMS Ark Royal was built by Swan Hunter on the Tyne, her keel laid on 7 December 1978 and launched on 2 June 1981, sponsored by the Queen Mother.

Originally due to be named Indomitable to match her sister ships, she was renamed Ark Royal after public sentiment ran high following the scrapping of the previous carrier to bear the name in 1980, and commissioned on 1 November 1985 as the third and final Invincible-class carrier, slightly larger than her sisters and fitted with a steeper ski-jump ramp, displacing 22,000 tons and powered by four Rolls-Royce Olympus gas turbines delivering over 28 knots, with a crew complement of just over a thousand including her embarked Fleet Air Arm personnel.

The name itself goes back a very long way, and the strength of public feeling in 1980 makes more sense with that in mind. The first Ark Royal was bought from Sir Walter Raleigh in 1587, having been built for him as the Ark Raleigh, and she was the English flagship against the Spanish Armada the following year with Lord Howard of Effingham aboard. Every ship to carry the name since has inherited that. When the previous Ark Royal went to the breakers and the Navy proposed to call the new ship Indomitable, the response was strong enough to change the Admiralty's mind, which does not happen often.

The class exists because of a piece of institutional sleight of hand, and it is one of the better stories in postwar British defence. In 1966 the government cancelled CVA-01, the large fleet carrier the Royal Navy had been planning for a decade, and announced that Britain was getting out of the fixed-wing carrier business altogether. The Navy, which did not agree, went away and drew up a requirement for something else entirely: a Command Cruiser, for anti-submarine work, carrying half a dozen Sea King helicopters and the Sea Dart missile system. The papers referred to a through-deck cruiser. Nobody wrote the word carrier down anywhere, and the drawings were presented in a way that did not draw attention to the fact that the deck ran unobstructed from one end to the other.

What made the deception worth attempting was the Harrier. A jump jet does not need a catapult or arrester wires, which meant a ship that had been justified as a helicopter cruiser could operate fixed-wing combat aircraft after all, and by the time anybody in the Treasury noticed, the ships were being built. The Invincible class went to war in the South Atlantic in 1982 as aircraft carriers in everything but name, and the argument about whether Britain needed carriers was settled by events rather than by anybody winning it on paper.

The steeper ramp is worth explaining too, because it was a British invention and a very good one. In 1973 a Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Doug Taylor, was studying at Southampton University and was set the problem of how to get more out of a Harrier taking off from a short deck. His answer was to curve the forward end of the deck upwards. A ramp throws the aircraft into the air on a rising trajectory with time in hand to accelerate to proper flying speed, which means it can leave the deck carrying a great deal more fuel and weapons than a flat run allows. Invincible and Illustrious got ramps of seven degrees, limited by the firing arcs of the Sea Dart launcher next to them. Ark Royal, coming later, was designed with twelve degrees from the start, and got correspondingly more out of her aircraft.

She could carry up to 22 aircraft, principally Harrier jump jets alongside Sea King and later Merlin helicopters, defended by a trio of Phalanx close-in weapon systems, sailing under the motto Zeal Does Not Rest.

Her first war came in 1991 and hardly anybody remembers she was in it. She sailed from the United Kingdom on 10 January that year, a week before the air campaign against Iraq opened, and took her task group not to the Gulf but to the eastern Mediterranean, joining the allied ships stationed there to guard against Iraqi aircraft coming west. It is the least glamorous job in a war: sit off Cyprus, keep the radar on and the fighters at readiness, and hope very much that nothing happens.

Nothing did, which was the point. It is also a fair illustration of what an Invincible-class ship was actually for. She had been justified as an anti-submarine cruiser for the North Atlantic, had turned out to be a light carrier, and in her first operational deployment was used as neither: she was air defence for a flank, several hundred miles from the fighting, in a war fought largely by other people. Ships of this size spend most of their lives doing exactly that, and it is the reason they are worth having.

The Adriatic and a Modern Makeover

Ark Royal deployed to the Adriatic Sea in 1993 under Captain Terry Loughran in support of operations during the Bosnian War, part of the broader NATO and UN naval presence enforcing sanctions and providing air support during the Yugoslav conflicts.

She underwent her first major refit between 1999 and 2001, which saw her Sea Dart missile system removed and her foredeck enlarged to increase her aircraft capacity, keeping her relevant as naval aviation requirements continued to evolve.

Tragedy Off Iraq

In 2003 Ark Royal sailed to the Persian Gulf for the invasion of Iraq under Captain Alan Massey, operating a primarily helicopter-based air wing for the campaign.

The deployment was marred by tragedy on 22 March, when two Sea King Mk 7 helicopters of 849 Naval Air Squadron, one landing and the other taking off on a surveillance mission over Iraq, collided roughly ten nautical miles north of the carrier, killing seven personnel, six British and one American; the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, confirmed there was no indication enemy fire had been involved, a devastating loss that stood as a sober reminder of the risks inherent in even the support and logistics side of carrier aviation, quite apart from combat itself.

They should have their names. The two aircraft were Sea King Mk 7s of A Flight, 849 Naval Air Squadron, out of Culdrose. Lost with them were Lieutenants Philip Green, thirty, of Caythorpe in Lincolnshire; Antony King, thirty-five, of Helston; Marc Lawrence, twenty-six, of Westgate on Sea; Philip West, thirty-two, of Budock Water; James Williams, twenty-eight, of Falmouth; and Andrew Wilson, thirty-six, of Exeter. Three of the six lived within a few miles of the air station they flew from. The seventh was Lieutenant Thomas Mullen Adams of the United States Navy, twenty-seven years old, an exchange officer who had joined 849 the previous October, and the first American naval officer to die in the war.

The Board of Inquiry found that they had hit each other head on, and the reason is a small and bitter one. An airborne surveillance Sea King carries its radar in an inflatable dome on the side of the fuselage, and from directly ahead the aircraft presents almost nothing to see. The anti-collision beacons that would have helped were routinely switched off over the northern Gulf, because in humid, dusty air the light bounced back off the murk and made it harder to see out of the front. Two crews doing the sensible thing in the conditions they were given flew into each other.

She underwent a second major refit between 2004 and 2007, an £18 million modernisation completed that March, and went on to serve as the Royal Navy's flagship from May 2007, a role she held for the following four years, having already been recommissioned once before, by the Queen Mother in November 2001, the same royal sponsor who had launched her two decades earlier.

In November 2006, fresh out of refit at Portsmouth, she hosted the first landing by a British Army Apache attack helicopter, from 667 Squadron Army Air Corps, part of trials to widen the kinds of aircraft a Royal Navy carrier could operate.

She took part in Exercise Joint Warrior in 2008, made a homecoming visit to the Tyne in January 2009, sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June 2010 for the Royal Canadian Navy's centennial celebrations, and assisted with Operation Cunningham during that year's volcanic ash crisis, when the eruption of an Icelandic volcano grounded much of European air travel.

An Early Retirement

Her early retirement was announced on 19 October 2010, considerably earlier than her originally planned 2016 date, a casualty of defence budget cuts rather than any fault of her own.

The decision that retired her was rather bigger than one ship. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review paid off Ark Royal and, at the same time, scrapped the entire Harrier force, on the reasoning that the money was needed for the two new carriers already building and the F-35s to fly from them. The gap between the two was not small. When those four Harriers lifted off her deck on 24 November 2010 it ended British fixed-wing carrier aviation, and it stayed ended for the best part of nine years, until F-35Bs began operating from HMS Queen Elizabeth. It is the longest the Royal Navy has gone without the capability since it invented it.

The Harriers themselves went to the Americans. Seventy-two GR9s, held in flying condition at RAF Cottesmore, were sold to the United States Marine Corps in 2011 along with the spares inventory, for something in the order of a hundred and fifteen million pounds, of which about fifty million dollars was for the spares and a hundred and thirty for the aeroplanes. The Marines had no intention of flying them. They wanted them stripped for parts, to keep their own AV-8Bs in the air, which those parts duly did for another decade and more.

The arithmetic is what stings. Britain had spent something close to a billion pounds from 2005 onwards bringing the fleet up to GR9 standard, and then sold the results for roughly a tenth of that, as scrap with wings, to an ally who used them to prolong exactly the capability Britain had just given up. The Ministry of Defence pointed out, correctly, that the sale plus the savings from retiring the force added up to a billion pounds of relief on the budget. Both statements are true at once, which is generally the problem with defence economics.

She left the Clyde on her final operational voyage on 17 November, launched her last four Harrier GR9s on 24 November, and arrived back at Portsmouth on 3 December with a final air group of four Harriers, seven Merlin anti-submarine helicopters and three Sea King airborne early warning helicopters embarked.

She was formally decommissioned there on 11 March 2011, with HMS Albion taking over as the Royal Navy's flagship in her place.

She did not go straight to Turkey, and the eighteen months in between are worth recording. On 28 March 2011, seventeen days after she paid off, the Ministry of Defence advertised her for sale by tender, closing on 6 July, and effectively asked the country what it would like to do with an aircraft carrier. The country had ideas.

The proposals that got as far as being taken seriously included mooring her at the Royal Docks in east London as a hotel, a casino, a museum or some combination of the three; doing much the same at Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire; turning her into a floating helipad in the Royal Albert Dock; and towing her out and sinking her off the Devon coast as an artificial reef for divers. None of it came off. In September 2012 she went to Leyal for £2.9 million, which is roughly what a modest house in the Royal Docks would have cost at the time.

She was sold for scrap to the Turkish company Leyal Ship Recycling for £2.9 million in September 2012, finally departing Portsmouth on 20 May 2013 and arriving under tow at the scrapyard in Aliağa, Turkey, on 10 June that year, bringing to a close the career of the last ship to carry a name that had, across several very different vessels, become one of the most famous in the Royal Navy's history.

There is one last melancholy detail. Swan Hunter, the Tyneside yard that built her, took its own place among the casualties of the same decades: the shipbuilding business was wound down and the Wallsend cranes were sold to India in 2007. When Ark Royal made her homecoming visit to the Tyne in January 2009 and enormous crowds came out to see her, the yard that had launched her twenty-eight years earlier was already gone.