HMS Northumberland (F238): Rammed by a Russian Submarine She Was Tracking
Built on the Tyne
HMS Northumberland was built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend on the Tyne, launched in April 1992 sponsored by Lady Kerr, and commissioned in May 1994, the ninth Type 23 frigate built for the Royal Navy, carrying the pennant number F238 and a strong regional affiliation with the county whose name she bore.
A Costly Repair in Rio
HMS Northumberland deployed south with the Devonport Flotilla to the Falkland Islands between 1994 and 1995, diverting during the passage to rescue a fishing trawler caught in rough seas, an useful piece of unplanned lifesaving.
The deployment took a more troublesome turn when her bow sonar dome began leaking, forcing a three-week dry dock repair in Rio de Janeiro that ended up costing some £3 million, a significant unplanned expense for what had started out as a routine deployment.
Two Tonnes of Cocaine
HMS Northumberland deployed to the Caribbean in 1999 for disaster relief and drug interdiction work, seizing more than two tonnes of cocaine with an estimated street value of £135 million, working in cooperation with an embarked United States Coast Guard law enforcement detachment, a substantial single haul even by the standards of Royal Navy counter-narcotics operations.
Pioneering Operation Atalanta
HMS Northumberland underwent her first major overhaul since build at Rosyth between 2004 and 2005, receiving weapons and sensor upgrades along with new helicopter handling systems to accommodate the Merlin helicopter, and went on in 2008 to become the first Royal Navy warship to take part in the European Union's counter-piracy Operation Atalanta, patrolling the Gulf of Aden and escorting World Food Programme shipments between Mombasa and Mogadishu at a time when Somali piracy posed a truly serious threat to international shipping.
She returned to anti-piracy work with Task Force 151 in 2010, an eight-month Indian Ocean deployment disrupting piracy activity along the Somali coast, and in 2012 captured and destroyed more than £5 million worth of cannabis resin from smugglers operating in the Arabian Sea.
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Upgraded Three Times Over
HMS Northumberland received a Sea Wolf Mid-Life Update along with a combat system upgrade and new 30mm cannon during a 2011 refit, and underwent a further major upgrade between 2016 and 2018, fitted with the new Sea Ceptor surface-to-air missile system before returning to service, keeping a frigate originally commissioned in the mid-1990s truly relevant well into the following decades.
Struck by the Submarine She Was Hunting
HMS Northumberland experienced one of the more remarkable incidents of her later career in late 2020, while tracking a Russian submarine in the North Atlantic with a television crew embarked to film the operation: the Russian submarine being tracked struck HMS Northumberland's own towed sonar array, forcing the frigate to abort what had been planned as a 48-hour mission and return to port to have the damaged sonar replaced, a remarkably striking real-world reminder of just how close and physically hazardous modern anti-submarine tracking work can become.
COVID, the G7, and a Final Retirement
She remained an active and heavily used ship right through to the end of her career, logging 191 days at sea in 2022 alone and escorting the American submarine USS Tennessee during visits in both 2023 and 2024.
Her career finally came to an end in November 2024, when Defence Secretary John Healey announced her retirement after structural damage was found uneconomical to repair, with decommissioning scheduled to follow by March 2025, closing out the career of a frigate that had, quite literally, come under fire from the very Russian submarine she had been sent to track.
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