UK to sell 1 carrier to India?
November 16th, 2009 | Aviation Carriers Foreign navies Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
One of the UK's two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers could become an Indian carrier if a proposed sale goes through // Royal Navy
The shipbuilding future of the Royal Navy has grown so bleak that new stories about what could happen to it have almost lost their ability to dismay. After the Ministry of Defence raised the possibility that it could delete the ability to handle F-35B Lightning II fighters from one of its future aircraft carriers, now it’s raising the possibility of selling one ship outright — to India.
The financial penalties of not building one of the two Queen Elizabeth-class flattops are more prohibitive than going through with it, the UK’s Guardian newspaper reports, so selling one to India could presumably defray the economic impact of going ahead with two ships. It isn’t clear yet how that deal would affect India’s tortured attempts to buy the ex-Soviet aircraft carrier Gorshkov, or whether the upshot of it all means that the Indians could have two new carriers — a used Russian one and British one fresh off the showroom floor — when the smoke cleared in the next decade.
Other implications: Would India buy one of the CVFs as-is, meaning designed to accommodate the short-takeoff, vertical-landing F-35B, even though it isn’t a member of the Joint Strike Fighter club? Or would it ask for changes so the ship could handle a different jet, such as the Su-33? That’d be interesting.
Meantime, the UK could be left with one new carrier, half its original order of fighter jets, and, in a major crisis, could need support from the U.S. Navy more than ever.