HMS Prince of Wales (R09): The Carrier That Keeps Getting Back Up

Built in Six Yards, Assembled in One

HMS Prince of Wales is the second of the Royal Navy's two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, and like her sister ship she was built the only way a vessel of her size realistically could be in modern Britain: as 52 separate blocks, constructed in six different shipyards around the country, then floated together and assembled at Rosyth. The first steel was cut at Govan on 26 May 2011, the same date the ship is officially recorded as laid down, and she was launched in December 2017 before commissioning on 10 December 2019, joining the fleet at Portsmouth that November at a total programme cost, alongside her sister Queen Elizabeth, of £6.1 billion.

A Flight Deck the Size of Several Football Pitches

At 16,000 square metres, her flight deck, complete with the distinctive ski-jump ramp that lets short take-off F-35B Lightning jets launch without a catapult, can routinely operate 24 to 36 aircraft, with a surge capacity well beyond 65 if the mission demands it. She can also carry around 250 Royal Marines when configured for amphibious operations, giving her a genuine dual identity as both a strike carrier and a floating base for troops.

A Run of Bad Luck, Publicly Endured

It would be dishonest to tell Prince of Wales's story without mentioning the mechanical troubles that have, fairly or not, become almost as well known as her capabilities. Minor flooding was reported in May 2020, followed by more significant flooding from the fire control system that October, causing electrical damage serious enough to keep her confined to dock for the best part of eight months. The most dramatic failure came in August 2022, when the coupling connecting her outer propeller shaft to its drive shaft failed during an exercise off the south coast, causing what Rear Admiral Steve Moorhouse confirmed was significant damage to both shaft and propeller, and forcing the carrier to abandon a planned deployment to the United States. Repairs at Rosyth kept her out of action for almost a year before she returned to sea on 21 July 2023, and a further minor technical issue during a Norway port visit in June 2026 did little to help shake off the reputation.

Back at the Head of the Fleet

Whatever the headlines about breakdowns, Prince of Wales has consistently returned to genuinely serious front-line work. On 1 January 2022 she took over from the French Navy as command ship for NATO's maritime high readiness force, took part in the Cold Response 22 exercise in the Arctic, and represented the Royal Navy at the Atlantic Future Forum in New York. Between April and November 2025 she led an eight-month Indo-Pacific deployment, Operation Highmast, commanding a multinational Carrier Strike Group that included ships from Norway, Spain and Canada, taking in exercises with the Indian Navy, a call at Singapore, and a transit of the Red Sea before returning to Portsmouth that November.

Leading the Fleet North

Her current commission has, if anything, raised her profile further. In February 2026, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced at the Munich Security Conference that Prince of Wales would lead a UK Carrier Strike Group deployment to the North Atlantic and High North, a direct response to increased Russian naval activity in waters uncomfortably close to home. As of today she remains the Royal Navy's designated Fleet Flagship, the vessel around which the entire surface fleet's most demanding operations are built.

A Reputation Still Being Written

HMS Prince of Wales's early years have been a genuine mixture of the impressive and the embarrassing, a carrier capable of commanding NATO task forces and leading multinational deployments halfway around the world, while also occasionally needing a tow home. It is, in its own way, a very honest reflection of what building and operating cutting-edge warships at the absolute limit of a nation's shipbuilding capacity actually looks like: extraordinary capability, bought at the cost of the odd very public stumble, with the ship's actual operational record increasingly speaking louder than any of the breakdowns ever did.