15 nov. 2014 US Navy

7 nov. 2014 Lockheed Martin

27 Octobre 2014 Sources : Marine nationale 

17h. Vendredi 24 octobre 2014. L’avion de guet aérien Hawkeye se présente à 200 km/h à l’arrière du porte-avions Charles de Gaulle. L’hélicoptère de surveillance et de secours Pedro veille, comme toujours. Après avoir vérifié les paramètres d’alignement, de pente et d’incidence, les officiers d’appontage (OA) donnent leur feu vert à  «Pipo», le pilote de la flottille 4F aux commandes du Hawkeye. La crosse attrape le brin d’arrêt, qui se détend et stoppe l’aéronef sur 75 mètres en l’espace de quelques secondes.

En passerelle navigation, la manœuvre, comme toutes les autres, n’a pas échappé au regard du capitaine de vaisseau Vandier, commandant le porte-avions. C’est avec solennité et fierté qu’il l’annonce sur le canal de diffusion : le 34 000ème appontage vient d’être réalisé. «Pipo» voit ainsi son nom rajouté au tableau d’honneur en coursive principale du bord.

Au-delà du chiffre symbolique, c’est toute la maîtrise d’une technique rare, uniquement partagée avec les États-Unis et le savoir-faire du porte-avions français issu de la somme d’expérience accumulée en entraînement et en opération, qui s’exprime.

Tous les marins du Charles de Gaulle peuvent être fiers car c’est grâce à leur investissement et à leur travail passionné que le groupe aéronaval français est capable de faire voler ses aéronefs et de remplir ses missions en toute sécurité.

14/10/2014 Sources : Marine nationale

C’est la fin de la journée, et Arnaud rend son avion après son dernier vol de qualification. « Un appontage c’est toujours un combat », explique-t-il. «On regarde le miroir d’appontage jusqu’au bout, on se focalise dessus. Et d’un coup, on est sur le pont, on ne l’a pas vu arriver.»

Il reste concentré, jusqu’au bout, et attend le débriefing des OA. «Je me souviens de mon premier appontage », se remémore-t-il. « La vitesse, la violence du choc, le bruit de ferraille : c’était comme un gros accident de voiture.  C’est toujours aussi brutal, mais l’effet s’estompe au fur et à mesure qu’on accumule les appontages. On s’habitue, je suppose.».

Une fois la qualification accordée par le commandant du porte-avions, les pilotes doivent gagner en expérience. Les six appontages nécessaires pour réussir les EAE ne sont que les premiers des centaines de vols que chaque pilote effectuera au cours de sa carrière. «Le plus difficile est encore à venir», prévient Jean. «Une fois que tu es qualifié, on pense que tu sais faire, que c’est acquis. Mais rien n’est jamais acquis, il faut sans cesse se maintenir au niveau.».

Les jeunes qualifiés vont en effet devoir maintenant être capables d’enchaîner correctement une mission et un appontage, ce qui leur imposera de conserver de précieuses ressources en fin de vol. C’est la spécificité des pilotes d’aviation embarquée.

October 4, 2014: Strategy Page

On August 28 th , 2014 the last of Britain's Invincible class carriers, HMS Illustrious, was decommissioned. This comes only three years after Illustrious returned to service after a $60 million refurbishment. At that point the Illustrious no longer carried Harrier vertical takeoff/landing jets. Instead, 20 helicopters were on board and crew size had been reduced to 600. At that time it had already been decided to replace Illustrious with HMS Ocean in 2014. Ocean is an amphibious assault ship that was out of service from 2012 until 2014 for upgrades and maintenance. The 22,000 ton Ocean is now in service. The ship carries 18 helicopters, along with 840 marines and 40 vehicles. Ocean can also operate up to 15 Harriers.

Meanwhile the Royal Navy is looking for someone to adopt the Illustrious as a museum ship. The three Invincible class carriers entered service in the early 1980s and the other two were scraped in 2011 and 2014. All three were originally built for anti-submarine operations against Soviet subs in the North Atlantic. But the Soviet Navy disappeared in the early 1990s and the Invincibles were converted to more varied uses.

In early 2011, only 18 months after returning to service (after another round of upgrades) another Invincible, the HMS Ark Royal was decommissioned. Thus for a few months Britain had no aircraft carrier in service. The HMS Ocean did not count, as it only carried helicopters. But until the end of the decade, all British carriers will carry only helicopters. That's because in 2011 Britain retired all its Harrier vertical takeoff jets, which were the principal warplanes on the Invincible class carriers.

It was in late 2009 that the Ark Royal returned to service after seven months in the shipyard (for $20 million worth of repairs and upgrades). The Ark Royal also had a $47 million refit in 2006, and a more extensive, $210 million one, in 1999-2001, that resulted in a larger flight deck. The Ark Royal was to remain in service until the first of the two Queen Elizabeth class carriers entered service at the end of this decade. The Queen Elizabeths have been in the works since the late 1990s and the first one is expected to enter service by 2020.

The 22,000 ton Ark Royal entered service in 1985, one of three Invincible class carriers. It carried 24 aircraft and helicopters, and was operated by a crew of 1,100. The most notable aspect of a recent refit was the addition of accommodations for 400 marines. This made the Ark Royal into an amphibious carrier, and it could deliver the marines via helicopter, or boats. Earlier this year, the Invincible was towed to Turkey, where it is being broken up for scrap.

The new "Queen Elizabeth" class carriers are planning on having a ship's crew of 800 (or less) and an air wing complement of 600 personnel. Currently, you need a ship crew of about 2,000 for a carrier that size, plus nearly as many for the air wing. These carriers are going to cost about $5 billion each, and are to be in use for half a century (via periodic refits and refurbs). But the biggest cost will be personnel. Currently, it costs the U.S. Navy a bit over $100,000 per sailor per year. Do the math ($7 billion in crew costs over the life of each carrier.) So the smaller the crew, the greater the savings, and the more you can spend on upgrading the ship, buying new aircraft and the like.

These carriers will haul 34-45 aircraft and helicopters each and be able to handle about 110 flight operations every 24 hours. That's with current aircraft. The F-35C will be the primary warplane on the British carriers. But it's also likely that many, or all, of the next generation of aircraft on these ships will be robotic.

9/29/2014 Strategy Page

ATLANTIC OCEAN (Sept. 24, 2014) An F/A-18C Hornet assigned to the Ragin' Bulls of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 37 launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Karl Anderson)

Construction begins on the second Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales. Photo BAE Systems.

11 September 2014 naval-technology.com

BAE Systems has successfully docked the hull sections of the UK Royal Navy's second Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, at its Rosyth shipyard, marking the commencement of the carrier's assembly phase.

The latest move comes within days of the announcement by the UK Prime Minster David Cameron that HMS Prince of Wales will be commissioned, assuring that Britain would always possess an aircraft carrier, available from 2020.

Aircraft Carrier Alliance managing director Ian Booth said: "Every milestone in the carrier programme is hugely significant and the recent announcement that HMS Prince of Wales will enter service means there is a real sense of excitement as we start to bring the second ship together.

"Everyone working across the Alliance is incredibly proud of the work undertaken so far, in what is currently one of the biggest engineering projects in the country and we remain focused on delivering both ships to the highest standards."

Weighing at 6,000t and 8,000t respectively, both Lower Blocks 02 and 03 will form the distinctive forward hull section and the mid-section of the aircraft carrier's hull respectively.

Lower Block 02 will be equipped with machinery spaces, stores and switchboards, while Lower Block 03 will feature 160 cabins and the ship's bakery.

Following the anticipated structural completion by July 2016, Prince of Wales will begin sea trials in January 2019, followed by acceptance in August of the same year.

In addition, BAE is currently working on outfitting the HMS Queen Elizabeth preparing it for scheduled sea trials in 2016, with scheduled commissioning in 2017.

The UK is also investing to transform HM Naval Base Portsmouth as the home port of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, with work involving dredging the approach and main channels within the harbour, upgrading navigational support and the revamp of several jetties, together with extensive infrastructure enhancements.

Delivered by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, a joint initiative by BAE Systems, Thales UK, Babcock and the UK Ministry of Defence, both aircraft carriers will be the showpiece of Britain's defence capability for the 21st century.

The two 300m-long, 74m-wide and 65,000t vessels will boost sustained operations and ferry an air wing of up to 40 aircraft, as well as offer armed forces with a four-acre military operating base that can travel about 500 miles per day and be deployed anywhere worldwide.

Aug 12, 2014 ASDNews Source : Naval Air Systems Command

The Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) shipyard in Newport News, Virginia is all abuzz as below deck-testing of the Navy’s newest aircraft launch system begins aboard USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78).

Following months of large-scale hardware deliveries containing critical components of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and shipboard installation by HII, teams from the government and industry partner General Atomics completed installation of the software — the brains of the new system. Below deck-testing began Aug. 11 with the Launch Control Subsystem, the first of many subsystem assessments on the path toward EMALS shipboard certification.    

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August 6, 2014 by Kris Osborn -  defensetech.org

The Navy and Newport News Shipbuilding are working on new shipbuilding methods and making early progress with initial construction of the second, next-generation Ford-class aircraft carrier slated to enter service in March 2023 — the John F. Kennedy, or CVN 79.

The construction strategy for the Kennedy, which is thus far only 6 percent built, is using a handful of techniques intended to lower costs and call upon lessons learned from the building of the first Ford-class carrier in recent years, the USS Gerald R. Ford. The Ford was christened in November, is now undergoing additional testing and slated to enter service in 2016.

Read full article

August 8, 2014 by Kris Osborn - defensetech.org

Navy assets deployed to the Persian Gulf are responsible for providing the advanced fire power and weaponry used in targeted U.S. military strikes August 8 against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant artillery positions, Pentagon officials told Military​.com.

Two F/A-18 aircraft dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a mobile artillery piece near Irbil, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said in a statement. ISIL was using this artillery to shell Kurdish forces defending Irbil where U.S. personnel are located, he said.

The fighter jets were launched from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, which has been forward deployed in the region for months.

Read more

July 10, 2014 informationdissemination.net

4th July 2014  – by Alexander Clarke *   - europeangeostrategy.org

The game of chess is played with both players having sixteen pieces, of which eight on each side are pawns. Pawns are often the most undervalued of all pieces, but as Anatoly Karpov once said ‘pawns not only create the sketch for the whole painting, they are also the soil, the foundation, of any position’. The Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers will be the Queens of British strategy for most likely the next four to five decades. However, that strategy may evolve to deal with potential threats/situations which will arise over a far longer period of time. The trouble is that security, much like the game of chess, requires more than just Queens.

This is the problem for many navies in the modern world, including the United States Navy (USN), but for Britain, for the Royal Navy (RN), it is particularly acute. Gone are the Harriers, which leaving aside their operating from the Invincible-class carriers (that have been the most versatile pillar of Britain’s global reach capability for more than three decades), which would have operated from the Queen Elizabeths until the F35Bs were ready for service. This decision though is in the past. Short-termist it was, but it is not the only decision that was; and Britain has not been alone in making such decisions. The fact is democracies, Western ones especially, seem to have developed blinkers when it comes to conceiving of problems beyond the next election cycle. This is possibly because the political leaders fear public reaction to what might be required, but more likely it reflects a fear of their ability to sell the need for such things to a taxpaying public that in the modern 24-hour news cycle seems to consume information in ever smaller chunks.

Therefore while the economic crisis is starting to recede (although the joy of ‘boom and bust’ means there is another around the corner), nations are going to have to live with the decisions made in times of crisis for many years to come.

This is the problem for strategists, and for those looking after a nation’s security; they know the threats, they know what is needed – a ship may be twenty times better than a vessel in its predecessor class, but it can still only be in one place at a time. The same goes for planes, for tanks, for troops. Britain has equipped itself with an excellent, First Rate expeditionary aircraft carrier, but it is without fighters that can fly from it; it has six of the world’s best destroyers, yet they were not fitted with vital communications equipment or land attack missile capability; it has built some of the most complex and advanced submarines ever conceived, and is conceiving what could be a brilliantly versatile frigate class. The RN will be fielding some of the best First Rate vessels of any nation. The problem is that this is what all Western nations are doing and it is another trap, perhaps even worse than that posed by the election cycle.

Building the best and fielding only the best; it is arguable that Admiral Fisher started this habit when he was First Sea Lord and got rid of so many of Britain’s gunboats in order to provide manpower for his first rate Dreadnought Battleships of the Grand Fleet. Today it has led to navies, with Queens, with Rooks, with Bishops and Knights, but without Pawns; only First Rate ships are built and there are no cheap frigates or corvettes – that is the biggest problem. Without them there is no real chance for the presence that can alert, and even deter minor conflicts; allowing the First Rates to be saved for when they are really needed. The worst thing about all this, is that governments know there is the problem; the Black Swan concept was envisaged by the British Ministry of Defence/RN as the solution to the problem in 2012, but two years later the closest Britain has got to a small/affordable escort is the order for three new River-class offshore patrol vessels (OPVs).

* Dr. Alexander Clarke recently finished his PhD on British Naval Aviation in the 1920-1930s at the War Studies Department, King’s College London. He writes here in a personal capacity.