HMS Speedy (P296): The Royal Navy's One and Only Hydrofoil

A Boeing Jetfoil in Royal Navy Colours

HMS Speedy was a genuine oddity in the Royal Navy fleet, a Boeing Jetfoil built on the civilian Boeing 929 design, constructed by Boeing in Seattle and shipped to Britain to be fitted out by Vosper Thornycroft. She owed her existence, rather wonderfully, to an accounting problem: in 1978 the Ministry of Defence found itself with an embarrassing underspend and around 200 million pounds to return to the Treasury unless it could be put to use quickly, and a chartered evaluation of the civilian Jetfoil Flying Princess, then running P&O's Zeebrugge to London ferry service, had already impressed enough naval observers to make an off-the-shelf military order an easy way to spend it.

Ordered that June, laid down soon after, launched on 9 July 1979 at Seattle and christened by Mrs Margaret Jay, wife of the British Ambassador to the United States and, as it happened, daughter of the sitting Prime Minister, James Callaghan, the new ship was commissioned as HMS Speedy on 14 June 1980. The name Lightning had been the other contender, but Speedy won out, a name last held by a Second World War minesweeper that had earned three battle honours, and, before that, by an 1782 brig once commanded by Lord Cochrane, one of the two officers widely credited as inspiring C. S. Forester's fictional Captain Hornblower. Speedy was intended as the first of a planned class of twelve hydrofoils, an ambitious attempt to bring cutting-edge high-speed hull technology into front-line Royal Navy service, though a change of government later that year would see the rest of the order quietly dropped.

The Brig That Took a Frigate

The Cochrane connection deserves rather more than a clause, because the action that made the name is one of the most celebrated in the Royal Navy's history. On 6 May 1801, off Barcelona, the brig Speedy, mounting fourteen small guns with fifty-four men aboard because the rest of her people were away in prizes, met the Spanish xebec-frigate El Gamo: thirty-two guns and three hundred and nineteen men. Cochrane could not run and had no business fighting, so he did neither in the expected order. He hoisted American colours to make the Spaniard hesitate, closed while she was working out what he was, then ran his little brig in so tight alongside that her yards locked in El Gamo's rigging.

That was the whole trick. At that range the Spanish guns, run out and depressed as far as they would go, fired straight over the top of a brig sitting under her opponent's muzzles, while Speedy's own guns were elevated to fire up through El Gamo's decks. When the Spanish crew mustered to board, Cochrane boarded them instead with everybody he had, and the Spanish colours came down. Three of his men were killed and nine wounded. El Gamo lost fourteen dead and forty-one wounded, and was taken by a ship with a sixth of her crew. The Admiralty, being the Admiralty, was distinctly grudging about it, which is a theme that ran through the rest of Cochrane's career and eventually took him to the Chilean, Brazilian and Greek navies instead.

Gathering Data on a New Kind of Ship

Assigned to the Fishery Protection Squadron from Rosyth, Speedy's real purpose was to give the Royal Navy operational experience and hard performance data on hydrofoil technology, skimming above the waves on her foils at speeds past 45 knots rather than ploughing through them in the conventional way. Her first commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander Peter Roach, drove her from an aircraft-style seat rather than a conventional wheelhouse, and described handling her in rough weather as rather like driving down a country lane with a jammed accelerator and no brakes, adding that a warning button on the wheel gave everyone below a chance to grab something to hang on to before a big wave hit. On passage from Portsmouth to Rosyth she set a Boeing Jetfoil speed and distance record, covering 320 nautical miles to Flamborough Head at an average of 42 knots into headwinds of up to 35 knots.

What a Hydrofoil Actually Does

It is worth being clear about what the machinery under her was doing, because "skimming above the waves" undersells it. A Jetfoil has two sets of fully submerged foils, a small one forward under the bow and a large one aft, connected to the hull by struts. At low speed she floats like any other boat and the foils are simply wetted ironmongery hanging below her. As she accelerates, those foils generate lift in exactly the way an aircraft wing does, and somewhere around thirty knots the entire hull rises clear of the water and the only things still touching the sea are the struts and the foils themselves. From that point she is not a ship pushing water aside, she is a very small aeroplane flying at a depth of about six feet.

That is why she was fast and it is also why she needed an aircraft seat instead of a wheelhouse. Fully submerged foils are inherently unstable, so a Jetfoil is held level by an automatic control system that senses the sea ahead with a sonic height sensor and moves flaps on the foils many times a second to keep the hull at a constant height, the marine equivalent of an autopilot that never stops working. She was driven by two waterjets rather than propellers, because a propeller shaft to a foil six feet down is an engineering nightmare. And the whole arrangement has one hard limit: once the waves are bigger than the distance between the hull and the water, the foils start coming out of the sea, the control system loses its grip and the ship has to come off her foils and become a rather uncomfortable boat again. That is the polite technical meaning of the ministers' phrase about sea state five.

The hydrofoil's speed had a very practical use, too. In February 1981, cued in by an RAF Nimrod that had spotted her fishing illegally in the Western Approaches, Speedy ran down the Spanish trawler Pinar some seventy miles away in just ninety minutes flat out through a Force 6 gale, making the first arrest of what was billed as Britain's newest deterrent against illegal fishing; her captain, Oscar Villar, pleaded guilty at Falmouth Magistrates' Court and was fined 7,000 pounds.

In 1982 she underwent minesweeping and minelaying trials at Portsmouth, which proved unsuccessful; ministers later told Parliament she simply lacked the endurance and heavy-weather performance, above sea state five, to replace any of the Royal Navy's existing offshore patrol vessels. Boeing itself offered two hundred hours of free trials to keep the evaluation going, but the Ministry of Defence turned it down, budgets and crew postings having already moved on, a useful if faintly comic anticlimax that helped explain why the planned class of twelve never materialised beyond this single ship.

Britain was not alone in the experiment, and everybody who tried it reached the same conclusion at about the same time. The United States Navy built six Pegasus-class missile hydrofoils, armed them with Harpoon, ran them hard in the Caribbean drug war and had disposed of every one by 1993. Italy built the seven Sparviero-class boats and let them go the same way. The problems were identical in every navy: a hydrofoil burns fuel at a frightening rate to stay foilborne, has almost no range at speed, cannot carry much, is expensive to maintain because the foils and their control gear are precision aircraft engineering sitting in salt water, and stops being any use at all in the weather where a navy most wants a ship. Speed alone turned out not to be worth it, which is a conclusion the Royal Navy reached in 1982 for the price of one hull instead of twelve.

A Long Second Career as a Ferry

Sold out of Royal Navy service in 1986, Speedy made her final journey east not under her own power but as cargo, towed from Portsmouth to Southampton and loaded aboard the freighter Titan Scan bound for Hong Kong under the temporary name Speedy Princess. Converted from her military fit to a full passenger configuration by Far East Hydrofoil Co, later TurboJET, she found an entirely new purpose as Lilau, a high-speed passenger ferry running between Hong Kong and Macau, carrying passengers across the Pearl River Delta for well over three decades, a far longer and busier career than she had ever managed under the White Ensign.

Retired After the Bridge Opened

The opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge steadily eroded demand for the ferry route Lilau had served for so long, and the vessel sat idle from 2019 before finally being scrapped in 2021, bringing to an end the working life of what remains the only hydrofoil the Royal Navy ever operated, a brief but particularly fascinating experiment in getting a warship to fly just above the water rather than through it.

The pennant number did not stay idle either. P296 is carried today by HMS Dagger, a fast patrol boat of the Gibraltar Squadron that does 41 knots on waterjets, alongside her sister HMS Cutlass (P295). Forty years after the Navy decided that going very fast was not worth the trouble, it is still buying ships to do exactly that, having settled on a hull that stays in the water while it does it. The fishery protection work Speedy was bought for has gone the same way, and what that squadron actually spends its time on is set out in HMS Anglesey (P277), one of the slow, plain, trawler-hulled Islands that were bought at almost the same moment and lasted twenty-five years apiece.