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.

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 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.

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.

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 End

HMS Illustrious was formally decommissioned on 28 August 2014, 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.

Despite Ministry of Defence hopes of preserving her as a museum ship, no viable preservation plan emerged, and she was ultimately sold to the Turkish scrapyard Leyal in 2016, departing Portsmouth under tow on 7 December that year, 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.