HMS Invincible (R05): Sold to Australia, Then Rescued by a War

Named by the Queen

HMS Invincible was ordered from Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering on 17 April 1973 and laid down at Barrow-in-Furness that same day, the lead ship of her class and, in a nice piece of naval tradition, the seventh Royal Navy ship to carry the name. Her construction was delayed by design modifications and labour disputes, and she was finally launched by Queen Elizabeth II on 3 May 1977, entering Royal Navy service on 19 March 1980 and formally commissioning that July, becoming fully operational in June 1981.

Already Sold to Australia

HMS Invincible initially served as an anti-submarine warfare carrier alongside HMS Hermes, but by early 1982 her Royal Navy career appeared to be drawing to a premature close: in February that year, Australia agreed to purchase her for £175 million as a replacement for the ageing HMAS Melbourne, a sale that would have seen one of Britain's newest carriers transferred abroad barely two years after entering service, a genuine reflection of just how tight defence budgets had become by the early 1980s.

Rescued by War

Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982 changed everything: just three days later, a naval task force headed by HMS Invincible and HMS Hermes sailed from Portsmouth bound for the South Atlantic, carrying eight Sea Harrier fighters and twelve Sea King helicopters. The deployment was not without its close calls: on 23 April, her defence systems mistakenly locked onto a Brazilian airline DC-10 rather than the Argentine reconnaissance aircraft actually shadowing the fleet, a remarkably alarming near miss.

On 30 May, Argentine Super Etendard aircraft launched an Exocet missile attack, but British countermeasures, including deliberately flying aircraft at low level to disguise the carriers' true positions, successfully disrupted the assault; no British vessel was damaged, and despite persistent Argentine claims of having struck HMS Invincible herself, no evidence of any such hit has ever been produced. She had, notably, also carried ten nuclear depth bombs during the deployment, quietly removed in early May before combat operations intensified.

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The Sale That Never Happened

HMS Invincible's proven wartime value changed British defence thinking entirely: Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser offered to cancel the sale on 1 June 1982, even before the fighting had ended, and by July 1983 the Ministry of Defence had formally withdrawn its purchase offer altogether in order to maintain a three-carrier force, a truly direct consequence of the Falklands War reshaping Royal Navy carrier policy for decades to come.

Two More Decades of Service

HMS Invincible went on to serve for a further two decades, taking part in Operation Deny Flight and Operation Deliberate Force during the Yugoslav Wars between 1993 and 1995, leading deployments supporting 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines in 1997 under Rear Admiral Alan West, and contributing to Operation Bolton over southern Iraq before redeploying to the Balkans to support NATO action against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.

In a rather more lighthearted episode in 2003, she featured in a BBC Top Gear segment in which the racing driver known as The Stig attempted to reach 100mph in a Jaguar XJS on her flight deck, an attempt that ended with the car in the sea, a properly memorable moment of levity for a carrier whose career had otherwise been defined by remarkably serious operational service.

The End

HMS Invincible was decommissioned on 3 August 2005, just twenty months after an extensive refit that had been intended to give her a further decade of service, with HMS Illustrious taking over as fleet flagship. She was struck off the Naval Reserve List in September 2010 and offered for sale that December, ultimately sold to Leyal Ship Recycling in Turkey; she was towed out of Portsmouth on 24 March 2011 and arrived at Aliaga for scrapping that April, closing out the career of a carrier whose entire trajectory had been reshaped by a war that very nearly happened without her.

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