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.

The Name She Carries

The name is worth a section of its own, because the last ship to hold it had one of the shortest and most consequential careers in the Royal Navy's history and this one has never had to explain herself against it.

The battleship HMS Prince of Wales (53) commissioned in January 1941 and went to sea four months later with Vickers workmen still aboard nursing her new and troublesome turrets. On 24 May, in the Denmark Strait, she and HMS Hood (51) came up on Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. Hood blew up in a matter of minutes with all but three of her fourteen hundred men. Prince of Wales fought on alone with half her main armament out of action, and one of the shells she did get away holed Bismarck's forward fuel tanks. That hit is the reason the German admiral turned for France instead of into the Atlantic, and the reason the Home Fleet caught him three days later.

Ten weeks after that she carried Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to Placentia Bay in Newfoundland to meet Roosevelt, and the eight points the two men agreed on her quarterdeck became the Atlantic Charter, which is the document the United Nations grew out of. A battleship four months old had by then altered the course of the Battle of the Atlantic and hosted the drafting of the post-war order.

She had four more months. On 10 December 1941, off the coast of Malaya, she and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse (1916) were sunk by Japanese land-based aircraft, the first capital ships ever destroyed at sea while under way and free to manoeuvre, with no air cover overhead. Admiral Sir Tom Phillips and Captain John Leach both went down with her. Her own article tells that morning properly, including the single torpedo that did for her, and Repulse's carries what happened to the two wrecks in 2023.

Which is the context for the ski jump and the F-35s. The entire reason a Queen Elizabeth-class carrier exists, and the entire reason the Royal Navy will not send one anywhere without its own aircraft over it, was settled in about two hours off Kuantan on a December morning in 1941 by the last ship to carry this name.

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. On 21 November 2025 the UK Carrier Strike Group was declared at Full Operating Capability with 24 British and Italian F-35Bs embarked across her deck, the largest fifth-generation carrier air wing the Royal Navy has yet put to sea.

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 notably 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 22 April and 30 November 2025 she led Operation Highmast, an eight-month, 40,000-nautical-mile Indo-Pacific deployment commanding a multinational Carrier Strike Group that worked with more than 30 nations, taking in exercises with the Indian Navy, a call at Singapore, and a transit of the Red Sea.

That July she became the first Royal Navy aircraft carrier to visit Australia since HMS Illustrious in 1997, spending six days alongside at Darwin as the UK's flagship contribution to the multinational Exercise Talisman Sabre.

The following month, on 8 August, two of her F-35B Lightnings landed aboard the Japanese carrier JS Kaga in the Philippine Sea, the first time a British fighter jet had ever operated from a Japanese warship.

She sailed home to Portsmouth on 30 November 2025 to the biggest Royal Navy homecoming in twenty years, her ship's company lining the flight deck for Procedure Alpha as tugs escorted her past the Spinnaker Tower and up the harbour.

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.

Operation Firecrest, 2026

Operation Firecrest, the North Atlantic and High North deployment announced earlier in the year, played out exactly as billed. She sailed on 24 April 2026 at the head of the UK Carrier Strike Group alongside HMS Duncan and RFA Tidespring, tasked with proving the group could generate, sustain and, if called upon, defend NATO's northern flank.

On 2 July a Russian Tu-142 'Bear' maritime patrol aircraft dropped sonobuoys close to the carrier in the Norwegian Sea before two of her F-35Bs scrambled to intercept it, and days later her jets flew NATO air policing missions over Iceland, the first time a European aircraft carrier has flown that mission for the alliance.

By the time she returned to Portsmouth on 24 July, the carrier's warfare department had navigated 15,684 nautical miles over 7,890 hours of bridge watch, and her aviators had flown more than 750 deck landings, including the 9,000th of her career, closing out the phase with the multinational Exercise Neptune Strike.

A second phase of the deployment is expected later in the year, though the Royal Navy has yet to confirm a date, with maintenance under way at Portsmouth in the meantime.

Her sister has an article of her own here as well: HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08), who took the first of the class's big Indo-Pacific deployments in 2021 and has had her own share of shaft trouble since. So does HMS Duncan (D37), the destroyer who sailed north with her in April 2026 and who has spent a fair proportion of her own career watching Russian ships go past.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.