HMS Eagle (R05): Twenty Years From Suez to the Phantom That Never Flew

Laid Down as Audacious

HMS Eagle began life under a different name entirely. She was laid down as Audacious on 24 October 1942 at Harland and Wolff in Belfast, one of the Audacious-class fleet carriers, a larger follow-on design to the earlier Implacable class, with displacement growing from an originally planned 27,000 tons to over 32,000 tons as the design was adapted to handle bigger, heavier aircraft. Wartime priorities shifted rapidly once the immediate threat of invasion and the worst of the Battle of the Atlantic had passed, and construction slowed considerably. She was eventually renamed Eagle on 21 January 1946, taking the name and identity of a cancelled sister ship, and launched by Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen, on 19 March 1946.

As completed, HMS Eagle measured just over 803 feet in length with a beam of nearly 113 feet, and displaced 43,060 tons standard, rising to over 53,000 tons at full load, a genuinely large fleet carrier by any postwar standard. Eight Admiralty three-drum boilers fed Parsons steam turbines producing 152,000 shaft horsepower across four propeller shafts, giving her a top speed of around 31.5 knots. Construction finally finished on 1 October 1951, sea trials began that October, flying trials followed in February 1952, and HMS Eagle was formally accepted into service on 1 March 1952, nearly a decade after her keel had first been laid.

Entering Service

HMS Eagle's first air group reflected the early jet age of naval aviation: two squadrons of Supermarine Attacker jet fighters, two squadrons of Fairey Firefly anti-submarine aircraft, and a squadron of Blackburn Firebrand strike aircraft, an eclectic mix spanning genuinely modern jets alongside the propeller-driven types the Fleet Air Arm still relied on for many roles. She took part in the major NATO exercise Mainbrace in September 1952, one of the alliance's largest naval exercises of the early Cold War, before visiting the Mediterranean in early 1953 and then taking her place in the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead in June 1953, a spectacular gathering of the fleet to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. She joined the Mediterranean Fleet properly in February 1954.

Between June 1954 and February 1955, HMS Eagle received her first significant modification, a 5.5-degree angled flight deck and mirror landing aid, improvements that made operating jet aircraft considerably safer by allowing aircraft to land at an angle away from parked planes rather than straight down the deck's centreline, reducing the risk of a botched landing turning into a pile-up.

The Suez Crisis

HMS Eagle's only wartime service came in 1956, during the Suez Crisis, when Britain, France and Israel moved against Egypt following President Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Under the command of Captain H. C. D. MacLean, HMS Eagle operated a strike wing that included Westland Wyvern turboprop strike aircraft, Douglas Skyraiders, Hawker Sea Hawks and de Havilland Sea Venoms, flying operations against Egyptian targets during the brief but politically explosive campaign, an episode that, whatever its outcome for British foreign policy, demonstrated just how much punch a fully worked-up fleet carrier could deliver.

A £31 Million Rebuild

HMS Eagle entered Devonport Dockyard in 1959 for an extensive modernisation that ran until May 1964, an enormous £31 million programme that amounted to something close to a rebuild. She emerged with a completely reconstructed island superstructure, the new Type 984 radar capable of tracking and ranking up to 100 targets simultaneously, a fully angled 8.5-degree flight deck, two new BS5 steam catapults, and Seacat surface-to-air missiles replacing some of her older anti-aircraft guns, though she retained four 4.5-inch gun turrets. Once back in service, HMS Eagle operated a genuinely formidable air group of Blackburn Buccaneer strike aircraft, de Havilland Sea Vixen and Supermarine Scimitar fighters, and Fairey Gannet airborne early warning aircraft, putting her among the most capable carriers operated by any navy outside the United States at the time.

Trialling the Phantom, and a Decision Not to Pay

HMS Eagle underwent a further refit at Devonport beginning in early 1966 and recommissioned in 1967, fitted with a single DAX II arrestor wire, and went on to successfully conduct trials with the new McDonnell Douglas Phantom FG1 fighter using her more powerful waist catapult, a genuinely promising sign for the carrier's future usefulness. Unfortunately, the water-cooled jet blast deflectors needed to operate Phantoms routinely and safely were never actually fitted, meaning HMS Eagle never got to exploit the full potential the trials had demonstrated.

That gap proved decisive. In February 1972, the government of the day, under Lord Carrington as Defence Secretary, calculated that fully refitting HMS Eagle to operate Phantoms properly would cost a further £25 to £30 million, and decided against it. HMS Eagle was paid off at Portsmouth after twenty years and four months of service, a startlingly abrupt end for a ship that had only recently proven she could do the job, brought down not by any failure of the ship herself but by a budgetary line that the government of the day was no longer willing to fund.

A Slow Final Voyage

Once paid off, HMS Eagle was stripped of much of her remaining equipment, serving as a source of spare parts to keep her sister ship HMS Ark Royal running for a few more years of active service, a quietly useful final contribution even after her own operational life had ended. She was eventually sold for scrap and towed from Devonport on 14 October 1978 to Cairnryan near Stranraer, arriving five days later, and was already partway through demolition when HMS Ark Royal herself arrived at the same breaker's yard for scrapping on 28 September 1980, the two former sister ships meeting one last time at the end of both their careers. One of HMS Eagle's anchors survives today at the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton, a solid, physical reminder of one of the Royal Navy's great postwar fleet carriers.