HMS Llandaff (F61): From a Storm-Snapped Mooring to the Search for MH370

Constructed at Hebburn

HMS Llandaff was laid down on 27 August 1953 by Hawthorn Leslie and Company at Hebburn on the Tyne and launched on 30 November 1955, christened by Countess Mountbatten, wife of Earl Louis Mountbatten, a Salisbury-class Type 61 aircraft direction frigate built to provide radar control for carrier aircraft rather than to fight conventional gunnery actions herself.

A Dramatic Start Before She Even Commissioned

HMS Llandaff's career got off to a chaotic start. On 1 March 1956, still fitting out and not yet commissioned, she broke away from her moorings in a storm and collided with both HMS Bermuda and HMS Russell, along with a merchant vessel, sustaining damage in the process, a thoroughly inauspicious beginning for a ship that had not yet even entered active service.

She eventually commissioned on 11 April 1958, becoming the first ship to be trained by the newly established Flag Officer Sea Training organisation at Portland, an organisation that would go on to become a cornerstone of Royal Navy training for decades afterward.

A Flag-Showing Voyage Home

HMS Llandaff recommissioned at Singapore in 1967 and undertook an extensive flag-showing voyage home between June and September 1968, calling at the Solomon Islands, Australia, New Zealand and across the Pacific before returning to British waters that September, completing her commission at Devonport in 1970, a lengthy and geographically wide-ranging deployment that gave the Royal Navy a genuine presence across a vast stretch of ocean.

A Long Second Life as Umar Farooq

HMS Llandaff was sold to the Bangladesh Navy on 10 December 1976 and renamed BNS Umar Farooq, going on to serve for the following four decades as a training ship, with accommodation modified to allow for female officers, a properly significant step for the Bangladesh Navy's own gradual modernisation.

Based at Chittagong, she carried out goodwill visits over the following years, and in 2014, remarkably, took part in the international search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a striking illustration of just how far a ship's usefulness could extend well beyond her original design purpose.

A Long Career Finally Ends

HMS Llandaff, by then BNS Umar Farooq, was finally sold for scrapping in 2016, closing out a career of sixty years that had begun with a storm-torn mooring line and two accidental collisions before she had even properly entered service, and ended with a ship built for Cold War carrier radar direction taking part in one of the twenty-first century's most extensive maritime search operations.