Pilot wash-down links
July 8th, 2010 | Personnel Royal Navy Submarines The Pacific | Posted by Phil Ewing
"Keep it comin', shipmates!" // Navy
It’s a brutally hot week here in the National Capital Region. Cars are getting trapped in the asphalt as it liquefies; birds are bursting into flames in mid-air; and on Wednesday we had to turn off all the lights here at the Center of Excellence in order to forestall a blackout. Y”know what would be nice? Landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, climbing out of the cockpit and getting drenched by a fire hose. That, and looking at some links:
- Our senior colleague Bill McMichael obtained a copy of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell survey making its way to service members across the military, and you can check out his exclusive report here.
- Time Magazine says the presence of all four SSGNs in the Pacific — you can remember them because they’re two pairs of football rivals, Ohio v Michigan and Florida v Georgia — should sound “alarm bells” in Beijing.
- The U.K.’s top navy man, First Sea Lord Adm. Sir Mark Stanhope, is going on the defensive: The Royal Navy is not a luxury, he says — it’s a necessity.
- The U.S. Navy’s cruiser-mod program continues apace, but it doesn’t seem to be following the ships’ class order: The next patient to undergo the treatment is Chosin, which is CG 65, after the first one to finish was Bunker Hill, CG 52.
- Strikegroupsploitation continues on the periphery of the web! Now the senior naval correspondent of Workers World is breaking the story those stooges in the lamestream media don’t want you to see: “The Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Force included an aircraft carrier, a guided missile cruiser and nearly a dozen Aegis-class destroyers. Also included were the German frigate GGS Hessen and at least one Israeli vessel. Three nuclear-powered carriers with their complements of destroyers and cruisers, amphibious assault ships, and 10,000 combat personnel are now arrayed off Iran’s coasts.” Pow! Shazam! Gee whiz!
- Military Times’ senior sportswriter Mike Hoffman has all the details on the Naval Academy’s incoming class of football players over at our siblog After Action.
The faceless men
June 18th, 2010 | Carriers Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
ABOARD THE HMS ARK ROYAL — My colleague Colin Kelly snapped this surreal image of a damage control drill on the ship’s elegant quarterdeck. Over the roar of the wake under the fantail — Ark Royal was almost at full power to get wind over the deck for flight ops — sailors trained for how to respond to a fire.
The idea was to train sailors to work in spaces completely obscured by smoke, so the crew members wore hoods to block their vision and radio helmets through which they could hear voice commands. A sailor picked up a drum of Aqueous Film-Forming Foam and listened to instructions from a supervisor on when to walk, when to turn, and when to stop.
All this took place in view of a grim reminder of the Royal Navy’s long experience with damage control. On the quarterdeck is Ark Royal’s battle honors board, which includes all the exploits of all the warships named Ark Royal throughout history, including the Spanish Armada, the hunt for the Bismarck, and the 2003 Battle of Al Faw.
In that context, with that damage control drill, it was impossible not to think of the third Ark Royal,which suffered the most violent end of all five ships to bear the name — sunk off Gibraltar in 1941.
Merlin helicopter links
June 16th, 2010 | Carriers Historical leadership Royal Navy Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
Much as Merlin helicopters have plenty of room for the needs of Royal Navy strike groups, so too are today's links capacious enough to bring you plenty of information. // Royal Navy
Sonar dippin’, torpedo droppin’, medium-lift mission flyin’, links, with plenty of legroom and no unpleasant hydraulic fluid leaking from the overheads:
- Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has been called up to the show: The White House wants him to knock off all this silly Navy stuff and start preparing a high-profile, long term Gulf Coast “recovery plan.”
- Remember the littoral combat ship down-select? It could actually happen sometime. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin announced that LCS 3 is halfway built.
- The retired aircraft carrier Forrestal is under tow this week, on its way from Newport, R.I. to Philadelphia, but nobody quite knows what’s going to happen to it.
- Even for a country that is accused of sinking the warship of another sovereign nation on the high seas, North Korea has an amazing amount of chutzpah: If the U.N. tries to “condemn” the sinking of the South Korean patrol ship Cheonan, the North will “respond,” it warned ominously.
- The web’s foremost O-5 amphibian has a really interesting link that gives valuable context: If you think our chief of naval operations has a tough job, think about the CNO of Somalia. Fun fact: He has not been to sea in 23 years.
- Sometimes you wonder about stuff: The retired aircraft carrier Intrepid, which spent its legendary career as a seagoing launchpad of death and destruction, will “honor” Mother Teresa on her 100th birthday.
The civilized way to go to sea
June 15th, 2010 | Carriers Royal Navy The deckplates | Posted by Phil Ewing
When the sun goes down over Ark Royal -- if there's no work to do -- sailors have a chance to socialize, relax and yes, enjoy a drink. // Royal Navy
ABOARD THE HMS ARK ROYAL — In my many happy years as an alcohol enthusiast, I have never had a beer as refreshing as the pint of John Smith’s Extra Smooth I enjoyed in the wardroom after a day of inhaling Harrier exhaust and clambering over almost every inch of this ship, from keel to TACAN.
Lt. Cmdr. Phil Rogers, Ark Royal’s part-time spokesman, was good enough to stand the round; he included my drink on the slip of paper that officers give to enlisted bartenders, which the ship’s pursers use to track who drinks what. Officers’ bar tabs, as recorded in these order slips, are added in their mess bills, so the ship can recover the cost and crew members don’t need to carry cash.
Ark Royal’s wardroom bar is a seagoing Elysium. The ship deploys equipped with stout, bitters, lager, red wine, white wine, gin, whiskey, whisky, and — of course — Pusser’s Navy Rum, the rum of “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” fame, which, properly diluted, is the main ingredient in the Royal Navy’s most famous beverage: grog. The wardroom also displays a set of enormous Glengoyne whisky barrels, because Glengoyne “was the queen mother’s favorite tipple,” said Cmdr. Dan Ferris, Ark Royal’s weapons officer; Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (aka the “Queen Mum”) was Ark Royal’s sponsor.
But for American visitors, the alcohol isn’t the most unfamiliar or unusual thing aboard. If you took the booze away, you’d still have something almost no U.S. Navy ship has: A command-sanctioned area for every hand aboard to unwind, relax and socialize while off duty, making life eminently more enjoyable over the course of your months underway.
Steady on
June 15th, 2010 | Carriers Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
Ark Royal can take on a decided list depending on where its air wing is parked; keeping the ship level is a non-stop job. // Gregg Macready / Royal Navy
ABOARD THE HMS ARK ROYAL — Deep below the flight deck and its distinctive “ski jump,” a set of engineers has a full-time job keeping the runway of this floating airport as level possible. The problem is, it just doesn’t want to say that way.
Ark Royal’s flight deck is well above the waterline, and its superstructure towers many feet above that, giving the ship an unusually high center of gravity. Add the weight of bombed-up Harrier jets and the ship can take on a decided list, said Leading Logistician Simon Clare, who was on duty in the main-control space known as HQ1, monitoring all the ship’s vital signs. Engineers pump fuel and ballast water throughout tanks at the keel to make sure Ark Royal rides as even as possible, but it’s a never-ending job.
Ark Royal’s engineers try to keep a list of no more than two degrees, although the ship can lean even farther depending on where its Harriers and helicopters are parked, and where they’ll be when they return.
“Soon as you make it right, the jets take off, so you’ve got to set it the other way round,” Clare said. “You don’t want to make it any more dangerous than it already is.”
A carrier with a British accent
June 15th, 2010 | Carriers Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
The Royal Navy carrier Ark Royal and its strike group are visiting the East Coast for the next several weeks to take part in international exercises. // Gregg Macready / Royal Navy
ABOARD THE HMS ARK ROYAL — When we Americans think “carrier,” we get a mental picture of being in a small sailboat off Cape Henry, looking over and suddenly seeing the Enterprise bearing down like a steel mountain, blocking out the sun, going on for days like the Imperial Star Destroyer from the opening moments of “Star Wars.” But Ark Royal isn’t like that.
This could be the nimblest, sportiest aircraft carrier in the world; she turns and leans like a destroyer when the crew points her into the wind for flight ops. A few colleagues and I got the rare chance to spend some time underway aboard Ark Royal last week, and you’ll be able to read much more about it in next week’s Navy Times and see for yourself on Sunday’s episode of This Week In Defense News.
In the meantime, though, it’s worth going over some basics about the Royal Navy flagship, which is spending a few months along the East Coast as part of a major international exercise with the U.S. and other international navies.
Flag matters
June 4th, 2010 | Life at Sea Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
MCSN Stuart Phillips / Navy
Here is a great excuse to trot out one of the neatest fun facts about today’s Navy: The destroyer Winston S. Churchill, as a rare American warship named for a foreign personage, is also the rare U.S. ship that can fly a foreign ensign — the Royal Navy’s iconic White Ensign, to be precise, which the ship has aloft for this transit through the English Channel with the British frigate Cumberland. You can just see it on the starboard side.
What’s more, if you look closely, you can see that Cumberland’s crew has run up the Stars and Stripes, making it the rare British warship to fly an American flag.
Stopping the trans-Atlantic drug-sub trade
June 1st, 2010 | Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
The Royal Navy destroyer Manchester will patrol this summer for bigger, heavier duty narco-subs in the Caribbean. // Royal Navy
We’ve all grown familiar with stories about self-propelled semi-submersibles, the homemade underwater or surface-skimming craft that cocaine smugglers use to try to get drugs out of Colombia. These fiberglass narco-subs are usually built by hand in the jungle, carry a few tons of dope, and sound like they provide a really hot, cramped, unpleasant ride for their crews.
This story in the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper describes what sounds like an altogether new kind of narco-sub, however — actual submarines, which can actually run underwater for actual distances:
The boats are thought to have been mostly former tourist underwater viewing submarines that have been adapted for smuggling able to carry up to five tonnes of cocaine worth £60 million on the streets of Britain. [Royal Navy] Rear Admiral Mark Anderson, commander of Fleet operations, said: “There’s clear evidence, not just intelligence, that they are trying to use submarines and have successfully used certain submersibles and we suspect submarines to transport drugs.” He added: “This is a hugely profitable business so they can buy some hugely expensive assets. What they are buying is extraordinary.”
Many of the drugs these bigger narco-subs are carrying end up in Great Britain, so the Royal Navy has dispatched the destroyer Manchester to run interference. Manchester has big shoes to fill, as one of its predecessors, the frigate Iron Duke, became well known for its counter-drug exploits.
‘Sorry, chief, I’m not qualified in metric line-handling’
May 19th, 2010 | Foreign navies Maritime operations Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
The Royal Navy carrier Ark Royal is just one of many international warships scheduled to pay a visit to Hampton Roads over this summer. // MC3 Brian Goodwin / Navy
… or maybe it’s not that different after all — when the Royal Navy carrier Ark Royal docked for a port visit in Norfolk on Friday, these American sailors discovered you don’t seem to need any special skills to handle lines for a foreign warship. Ark Royal is in the U.S. as part of Operation Auriga, which will include exercises with its U.S. Navy counterparts. According to The News of Portsmouth, the Royal Navy is sending Ark Royal, the destroyer Liverpool, the frigate Sutherland and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ship Fort George.
U.S. and international warships are going to be training together a lot this summer, said Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Jensin Sommer — the waters off the East Coast will include guest appearances by at least British, French, Canadian and German warships.
Royal Navy denies central sea monster archive
May 17th, 2010 | Historical Life at Sea Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
According to the Ministry of Defence, the kraken attack depicted in this documentary photograph may have never happened, if you can believe such thing! // National Science Foundation
Do the archives of the Royal Navy include volume after gilt-edged volume detailing secret encounters between Her Majesty’s warships and horrifying sea creatures? Do archivists in catacombs deep below Whitehall maintain stacks of leather-bound books with reports about ships battling giant squid, or sea dragons, or the dreaded kraken? Are there pages upon pages of hand-drawn sketches or official — but censored — woodcuts depicting men ‘o war being pulled under the waves by enormous tentacles?
In one of the lamest and most disappointing answers in history: No.
The Ministry of Defence says it has no centralized records of ships’ reports about sea monsters or other unusual maritime creatures. Officials acknowledge there may be interesting details in individual ships’ logs, but there is no immense room with immense, floor-to-ceiling shelves full of 18th Century-era reports like the one about the frigate HMS Sabre, which was lost off the Seychelles after the ship was overrun by what its surviving crew members called “Scaled, forked-tongued Lizarde Men from the Deepe.”