HMS Illustrious (R06): Rushed to War Before She Was Even Commissioned

Built on the Tyne

HMS Illustrious was built by Swan Hunter at their yard on the River Tyne, construction beginning on 7 October 1976, the second of three Invincible-class light aircraft carriers. She was launched by Princess Margaret on 1 December 1978, a modern design built around Sea Harrier jump jets and Sea King helicopters rather than the larger conventional aircraft carried by her much bigger wartime predecessors. Her crew, with characteristic understatement, took to calling her 'Lusty'.

The class she belonged to exists because of one of the better pieces of institutional cunning in British defence history. In 1966 the government cancelled CVA-01, the large conventional carrier the Royal Navy had been planning for a decade, and the decision was understood on all sides to mean that Britain was getting out of fixed-wing carrier aviation permanently. The Navy still needed something to command an anti-submarine group in the North Atlantic and to carry a squadron of Sea King helicopters, so it went away and designed a ship to do that, with a flight deck running the full length of the hull, an island on the starboard side and a hangar underneath. It then declined, absolutely and for years, to call the thing an aircraft carrier. The official term was through-deck cruiser, which is a description so studiously bland that it could only have been chosen by somebody who knew exactly what he was up to. By the time anyone in the Treasury looked closely, the ships were being built and the Harrier existed, and the Royal Navy had quietly reacquired the capability it had been told it could not have.

The ski-jump on her bow is the other half of that trick, and it is a genuinely elegant piece of engineering. A Harrier taking off vertically can lift very little beyond itself; a Harrier making a short rolling take-off can lift a great deal more, but needs a run, and 170 metres of flight deck is not much of one. The answer, worked out in the 1970s, was to curve the last stretch of deck upwards. The aircraft leaves the ramp on an upward trajectory with plenty of forward speed but not yet enough wing lift to fly, and the vectored thrust holds it in the air for the couple of seconds it takes to accelerate to proper flying speed. The effect is to let a Harrier take off with several thousand extra pounds of fuel and weapons from a deck far too short for a conventional aircraft. Invincible and Illustrious were built with a seven-degree ramp. Every ski-jump carrier since, anywhere in the world, is descended from that idea.

Commissioned at Sea, Racing to War

HMS Illustrious's schedule was dramatically overtaken by events when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982. Still fitting out and nowhere near her planned commissioning date, she had her construction and trials programme urgently compressed, and was formally commissioned at sea on 20 June 1982, while actually en route to Portsmouth, a truly extraordinary way for any warship to enter service.

She also went south carrying something no British warship had ever had. The Falklands had shown, expensively, what a sea-skimming missile does to a ship with no last-ditch defence, and the Royal Navy went straight to the Americans for the Phalanx close-in weapon system, a radar-directed rotary cannon that hunts and shoots down whatever gets past everything else. The first two mountings in British service were bolted onto Illustrious before she left the Tyne in June 1982. It is a good illustration of how the war concentrated minds: a procurement decision that would ordinarily have taken years took weeks, and the ship that had been rushed out of her builder's hands three months early went to sea better protected than any ship that had actually fought the campaign.

Her completion at Swan Hunter was brought forward by roughly three months to get her to sea in time, and when she sailed south she carried 809 Naval Air Squadron, specially reformed for the occasion to fly Sea Harriers from her deck, alongside the Sea Kings of 814 Naval Air Squadron, with Rear Admiral Derek Reffell, Flag Officer Third Flotilla, commanding the relief task group from her own flight deck.

She arrived in the Falklands on 28 August 1982 to relieve HMS Invincible, carrying Sea Harriers and Sea King helicopters to help provide continued air defence for the islands after the fighting had ended and the RAF airfield at Stanley was being repaired.

She was only formally commissioned into the fleet in the more conventional sense on 20 March 1983, following her eventual return to the UK, technically completing a process that had begun in the most unconventional circumstances imaginable.

There is one more thing the war did for her, which is that it guaranteed she would have a career at all. In February 1982, six weeks before the invasion, the Australian government had agreed to buy her sister Invincible for £175 million and rename her HMAS Australia. The Royal Navy was to be left with two small carriers rather than three, and the whole future of the class was in doubt. Then Argentina invaded, Invincible sailed south, and she came back a national heroine; in July 1983 the Ministry of Defence withdrew the offer altogether so that Britain could keep three carriers in commission. Had the Argentine junta waited another year, Invincible would have been in Sydney, Illustrious would have been holding the line alone, and it is unlikely anyone would have kept building the class. Wars decide fleet structures in ways nobody plans.

Three Decades of Global Service

HMS Illustrious went on to a remarkably long and varied career spanning more than three decades, taking part in Operation Southern Watch enforcing the no-fly zone over Iraq in 1998, Operation Deny Flight over Bosnia during the 1990s, Operation Palliser supporting British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000, and humanitarian assistance operations during the 2006 Lebanon War, a properly wide-ranging record of service that took her from enforcing peace to providing disaster relief across multiple continents.

It is worth saying what those three decades of operations actually amounted to, because a list of codenames conceals the point. Over Bosnia her Sea Harriers flew armed reconnaissance and close air support in a war where the airfields ashore were either unusable or in the wrong country. Off Sierra Leone in 2000 she arrived with the amphibious group during Operation Palliser, when a small British force stopped a rebel advance on Freetown, and the presence of a carrier offshore with strike aircraft aboard was itself a large part of the argument. In 2006 she stood off Lebanon during the war there while British and other nationals were taken out by sea. None of that involved sinking anybody. What it involved was being able to put an airfield, a hospital, a headquarters, a thousand people and several hundred tons of stores off somebody's coast within a few days, without asking anybody's permission to use their runway. That is what a carrier is for, and it is why the Navy spent fifteen years calling one a cruiser to get it built.

HMS Illustrious transitioned to serve as a helicopter carrier following the retirement of the Harrier from Royal Navy service in 2010, and underwent a £40 million refit in 2011 to extend her useful working life a little further.

The 2010 decision that turned her into a helicopter carrier was one of the most argued-over in modern British defence. The Strategic Defence and Security Review of that year retired the entire Harrier force at a stroke, some years before the new carriers and their F-35s would be ready, on the grounds that the money was not there to run both. The consequence was that between 2010 and the arrival of carrier-borne F-35s the Royal Navy had no fixed-wing aviation at sea at all, a gap of roughly a decade in a capability that takes a generation to build and about a fortnight to lose. Illustrious spent her last four years as a helicopter carrier, which she did perfectly well, but the ski-jump on her bow had nothing to launch off it. A £40 million refit in 2011 kept her going a little longer as the last of her class in service.

Across those three decades she steamed something like 900,000 miles, the rough equivalent of well over thirty-five trips around the Earth's equator, a properly enormous total for a ship that had begun her working life being finished three months ahead of schedule.

The most useful thing she ever did came right at the end of that, and it was not a military operation. In November 2013, on her final deployment east of Suez, she was diverted to the Philippines after Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, had flattened a swathe of the central islands and killed several thousand people. She relieved the destroyer HMS Daring and went to work with her helicopters and her landing craft doing exactly what a carrier does best in a disaster: reaching places where the roads and the airfields have gone, carrying water purification equipment, engineers, medical teams and stores into island communities that had been cut off completely. It is the same capability that makes a carrier useful in a war, applied to the opposite purpose, and it is the reason navies keep building them.

The End

HMS Illustrious returned to Portsmouth for the last time on 22 July 2014, and was formally decommissioned on 28 August that year, by then the oldest ship in the Royal Navy's active fleet, closing out 32 years of service that had begun in such dramatic fashion during the Falklands War.

The Ministry of Defence had promised in 2012 to preserve her for the nation, and Hull, Portsmouth and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar all put in bids to turn her into a museum ship, but none proved financially viable, and in August 2016 she was sold instead to the Turkish firm Leyal Ship Recycling for £2 million.

Two million pounds for a 22,000-ton ship is scrap value and nothing more, and the failure to preserve her is worth being honest about. Preserving a warship is not a matter of finding a berth; it is a matter of finding somebody to pay for a steel hull, in salt water, in perpetuity. HMS Belfast costs a great deal every year and survives because she sits in the middle of London with several million visitors a year within walking distance. Victory sits in a dockyard that already had the infrastructure. An Invincible-class carrier is bigger than either, needs deep water, and has no obvious tourist catchment; Hull, Portsmouth and Gibraltar all looked at the numbers and all reached the same conclusion. Her two sisters went the same way, both to Turkish breakers, and by the end of 2016 the entire class was gone. It is not sentimental to regret that; it is simply expensive not to.

She departed Portsmouth under tow on 7 December that year, arriving at the Aliaga shipbreaking yard near Izmir before the year was out, bringing to an end the career of a carrier whose service had begun, quite literally, at sea and mid-crisis, and had gone on to particularly earn every one of the three decades that followed.

There is a neatness to the two Illustriouses that is worth pointing out. The fifth of the name was ordered in 1937 as an experiment in whether an aircraft carrier could be armoured, and spent the war proving it under conditions nobody had designed for; her story is in the article on HMS Illustrious (87). The sixth was ordered as a cruiser that everybody knew was a carrier, was finished three months early because a war started, was commissioned in the open sea on the way home from it, and spent thirty-two years being sent to whatever had just gone wrong, from Bosnia to Sierra Leone to a Philippine island with no drinking water. Neither of them had the career anybody planned. Both of them were, on the evidence, worth every penny.