This is a transformational time for UK defence and particularly for the Royal Navy," says Commodore Jerry Kyd. He's sitting in a meeting room in a small office block talking about the two biggest warships the Royal Navy has ever commissioned (both of which are being built across the road at the Rosyth Dockyard on the Firth of Forth). Kyd pops a mint in his mouth. "We're getting back into the big carrier game, which we've not been in since the 70s."

From the office block you can see one of the vast bows looming from a dry dock. That's HMS Prince of Wales, the second of the two Queen Elizabeth class of carriers. She is structurally complete, but thousands of workers are finishing her compartments and flight deck in time for sea trials in 2019. The first ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, which Kyd will command, is a few hundred metres along the dock, already in water, preparing for sea trials in 2017.


Both ships are vast. Their individual displacement is 65,000 tonnes (ships are measured by the weight of the water they displace), roughly three times bigger than the UK's previous carriers, the Invincible class, all three of which have been decommissioned - a decision that has left the UK without an aircraft carrier, other than helicopter platforms, since 2014. The new carriers are 280 metres long and 70 metres wide, and are due to carry up to 36 F-35B fighter jets and four Merlin helicopters.

Only a handful of countries have comparable aircraft carriers: China, France and Russia have one big carrier each ("Russian behaviour" had its own section in the National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, and will no doubt influence how and where the UK's carriers are deployed). The US has the ten biggest carriers in the world, each with a displacement of about 100,000 tonnes. Only China, India, the UK and US are building big new carriers. They are a rare asset that Kyd expects to be the UK's main deterrent with a "very high political demand".

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Gallery: inside the Royal Navy's Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier Gallery Gallery: inside the Royal Navy's Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier + 8

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"Why would you invest all this money and not use it?" he says. "So she will be used politically. She'll be run by the prime minister, and whenever there's a crisis brewing I think we'll mimic the US president - the first question they ask is, 'Where is my nearest aircraft carrier?' Because you are putting four-and-a-half acres [1.82 hectares] of British sovereign real estate anywhere in the world that you want, with impunity on the commons that is the sea, with a big, big stick."


Not everybody, however, agrees on the choice of stick. For a start, they are expensive (£6.2 billion, up from the £3.5 billion projected in 2007) for a country feeling the effects of austerity. There has been speculation that there won't be enough trained sailors to operate the carriers (in September the minister of state of the armed forces assured Parliament there would be). And the new F-35B fighter jets Britain is buying from the US to use on the ships have had something of a shellacking in the press, primarily because the UK has opted for a version with a shorter range and smaller payload than other jets.

In response to the critical press, the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, the group developing the ships, which comprises the Ministry of Defence, BAE Systems, Babcock and Thales, has been on a public-relations offensive, dishing out fun facts (how loud the foghorn is, what the ship's sausage-storage capacity is and so on) and taking journalists on tours. And yet the criticism has continued, with a constant question posed: are these ships transformational, or are they expensive white elephants?

When asked to rank their importance as a military asset, Kyd sucks on his mint for a couple of seconds before giving a surprising answer: "This is the most seminal change in maritime power since the advent of the nuclear submarine, and arguably since the change of sail to steam."

Christoffer Rudquist


Naval aviation developed fast. In December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright took turns in flying their machine over the sand a few kilometres south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, achieving the first powered flight. Just seven years later, the US Navy erected a wooden flight deck over the bow of a cruiser called the USS Birmingham and American pilot Eugene Ely, in a rickety plane, dove off the end of the deck. After a brief drop it gained enough lift and landed on a nearby beach. You can see a photograph online - it's not for the skittish. Two months later he landed the same plane on a different ship. The era of the aircraft carrier had begun - and the Royal Navy needed to catch up.

Two years after Ely's test flights, Royal Navy pilot Charles Samson took off from a moving ship on the Medway, but the Royal Navy chose to focus on seaplanes - they could take off from a deck and be picked up from the water using a crane. However, the ships were vulnerable while stopped to retrieve the aircraft. The Royal Navy experimented with launching "one-way" planes in the hope they would find a strip on land or ditch. Again, not ideal. Attention then focused on planes that took off from and landed on a ship - so the Royal Navy commissioned HMS Argus.

Described as "the world's first true aircraft carrier" by former Royal Navy commander David Hobbs in his book British Aircraft Carriers, HMS Argus was going to be an Italian passenger ship, but work stopped during the first world war and the hull was bought by the Admiralty to convert into an aircraft carrier. She was completed as a flush-deck carrier (a flat deck with no "island" sticking up) and equipped with planes to launch torpedoes. Commissioned in 1918, she was launched days too late for the war, so became one of the Royal Navy's experimental ships. For example, a canvas dummy island was built and used for test flights - islands are better for navigation and positioning funnels.

There is a long list of Royal Navy inventions and innovations when it comes to carriers. The Royal Navy commissioned the first ship with steam catapults fitted, a technique adopted to launch jets which is still used on US carriers. The Navy invented mirror landing aids - a concave mirror sited on the side of the flight deck with lights that indicate whether the plane is on the correct glidepath. And the Navy first came up with the angled flight deck - a skewed deck that enables jet pilots who botch their landing to immediately attempt take-off from the side of the ship rather going off the bow and risking falling into the ship's path.

The first ship to be completed with such a deck was HMS Ark Royal in 1955. The same ship was the last Royal Navy carrier equipped with cats (catapults) and traps (arrestor cables) when it was decommissioned in 1979. Cats and traps let carriers launch jets with a greater range and payload than those using directional nozzles for short take-offs and vertical landings (STOVL), but the Royal Navy switched its focus to STOVL aircraft: Harriers. To launch and recover them, the Royal Navy used three Invincible-class carriers - HMS Invincible, HMS Illustrious and the new HMS Ark Royal, commissioned in 1980, 1982 and 1985 respectively.

Despite their relatively small size and the fact that they were originally designed for anti-submarine helicopters, the Invincible class was regarded as very effective (Kyd captained two of them and describes them as "brilliant"). But in 1997, the government announced that they would be replaced by two larger carriers. The UK, meanwhile, was already collaborating with the US on the F-35 fighter, of which there are three varieties: A for conventional runways; B for STOVL; and C for cats and traps. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) put its money into the F-35B, despite C having a greater range and payload capacity, and decided the two new carriers should be designed for STOVL aircraft.

That decision was supposed to be hedged. The two carriers will last for 50 years, so to cater for potential changes in warfare technology the MoD chose a design which would be "adaptable" for cats and traps (or an electromagnetic system which is expected to replace steam catapults). The government gave the green light to start work in 2008. In 2010, it said it might prefer the F-35C (because they had greater range and payload capacity). After an investigation, it was decided that adapting for cats and traps would be too expensive. So in 2012, the government decided to stick with F-35Bs. It was up to the Royal Navy to do its best with what it had.

Christoffer Rudquist

One of the problems with the F-35B is range. An aircraft carrier has to project and possibly wield power when a conventional runway is unavailable. To do that, the carrier needs to position itself so its aircraft can reach a target. "That can be right up the beach or very close in shore if the threat's been reduced," says Kyd. "Or it could be a hundred miles off the coast, flying jets in over the horizon." BAE Systems says the F-35B can fly 900 nautical miles (1,666km) compared to 1,200 (2,222km) for the F-35C, depending on conditions and payload. The planes need to return to the aircraft carrier, so they can only travel half that distance before turning around. The distance Kyd expects them to reach is "about 300 miles-ish" from the carrier.

"Physics just gets in the way," he says. "If you could design an aircraft to do a thousand-mile strike operation that's fantastic, but one of those does not exist at the moment. And so you have to mitigate that by using air-to-air refuellers or bring the ship in closer. Of course, as an operational commander you always want the maximum flexibility possible, but you have to work within the kit that you're provided with. The aircraft is phenomenal, as is the ship. We can move 500 miles a day, and when you're looking at the radius of action of helicopters and the jets, that's a massive, massive area you're controlling and dominating from the aircraft carrier. There's no other military formation that both effects sea control and power projects against the land. Nothing else does it. A carrier-strike group does." (When asked if he would prefer to operate with cats-and-traps planes, Kyd replies: "That's a really good question, and there are pros and cons both ways..."

Maybe refuelling is the answer to the F-35B's range problems. A couple of other limitations of the F-35B are being solved by David Atkinson, a BAE Systems aerospace engineer. Usually based at BAE's test site in Warton, Lancashire, he is at Rosyth Dockyard the first time WIRED speaks to him, and in Washington DC the second. Atkinson is charged with ensuring the F-35Bs operate seamlessly with the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers, and is in the US to discuss its progress towards flight trials on the carriers.

One key element in increasing the capability of the F-35B is the ski-jump ramp, a project Atkinson has been closely involved with. You've probably seen ski-jump ramps on carriers - they are the lip at the end of the flight deck which rises up. They were conceived by a Royal Navy officer in the 70s to increase the payload capacity of the Harrier when launched (they're unnecessary for cats-and-traps carriers). Various exit angles were trialled - the ramp on HMS Invincible was changed at one point - and after being proven it became a global standard for STOVL aircraft.

Flying the F-35B: inside BAE's secret war machine simulator tucked away in a quiet UK village Video Flying the F-35B: inside BAE's secret war machine simulator tucked away in a quiet UK village

"It reduces the risk from a mistimed launch," Atkinson says. "When a ship's pitching, that is when the vessel is pointing slightly downwards towards the sea, which isn't great if you are on a flat deck, whereas with a ski jump you've always got a positive upwards trajectory when you leave the ship. It reduces the pilot's workload and gives them more time to diagnose issues. It's a safer option for launching a STOVL aircraft and, from a performance point of view, it means you can launch with more weight from a shorter distance on the ship."

The ski-jump ramp needed to be updated for the F-35B, so a version based on the dimensions of those on the Invincible class was built at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River in Maryland (where Atkinson was heading after WIRED talked to him). Test flights showed that the F-35B was successful in automatically directing its thrusters when on the ramp. BAE just needed to figure out the ramp's optimal dimensions, which took two years. The new versions are 15 metres longer than the Invincibles', but are the same shape, and are now in place on the two flight decks. No prototypes were needed. "We don't need to with analysis and simulation," Atkinson says.

Next problem. When an F-35B pilot needs to land, the standard procedure would be to fly alongside the ship on the port side, towards its stern, then match the speed of the ship before applying a little lateral thrust to move the plane over the deck where it will land vertically on a designated spot (one of Kyd's "pros" for the F-35B is that there aren't planes coming on to the deck at high speed, so it's safer). However, when landing vertically, the F-35B can't carry much weight, so if the pilot didn't drop the ordnance the plane was carrying during the mission, it may have to drop those munitions in the sea before landing.

The F-35B may carry some very expensive weapons, which the Ministry of Defence would not like dropped in the sea. The potential solution is the Shipborne Rolling Vertical Landing (SRVL), a technique dating from the 70s and researched by the Ministry for use with the Harrier, but never brought into service. The pilot will fly towards the stern of the ship at a low speed while descending, guided by a helmet-mounted display and a stabilised aim point on the ship. The plane will then roll forwards as it lands and apply its brakes. Testing by Atkinson's team in an F-35B simulator at Warton will continue throughout 2017.

"We've been conducting our experiments," he says. "We've identified some things that we wanted to adjust slightly - the point at which the aircraft gets on, the speed that it's going to land at - those kind of things and what the advantages and disadvantages to each of those are. And we've worked with a whole range of test pilots and taken people's opinions and done analysis and shown how much extra fuel is needed if you get on-speed earlier. All of those things are traded, adjusted and adapted until you get to the final solution that is now in the aircraft software, and is the defined end-game. We're at the point where we know what the aircraft is going to be like when we go to the ship."

Christoffer Rudquist

It's fair to say that the F-35B is a complicated aircraft: it's new; it's STOVL; it's supersonic; and it has stealth capabilities. The complexity on this project is on the aircraft side of things. The ships themselves are not particularly complicated - they are enormous floating blocks on which planes can take off and land. Compared to fighter jets and submarines, their construction is pretty simple. Huge chunks were manufactured at various locations around the UK - the three biggest for each ship weigh more than 11,000 tonnes each, which is bigger than a Type-45 destroyer. To get them to the Rosyth shipyard, they were welded to barges and floated; upon arrival the welds were cut and the barges sunk. They were later recovered - contrary to the concerns of a recent visiting politician.

After being floated into the dock, the dock was drained and the blocks were slid together and welded. The smaller sections were lifted into place by crane, including the two islands. One of the islands is for the bridge, the other is for flight control, but both have extra space to accommodate the other in case of emergency: "If, in a wartime scenario, one of your islands is taken out, whether it's by a crash on deck or by enemy action, you can still run both functions," explains chief engineer Martin Douglass. Completing the flight deck is the current focus.

"That's probably the part of the ship that is most taxing right now," says Ian Booth, managing director of the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, the organisation that brings industry and the MoD together. "When [the decision was made] to go to CV aircraft - the cats-and-traps version - and then back again to STOVL, we lost some time because the flight deck was being redesigned. If there's anything on the ship that's been under pressure all the way through my stay here, it's been the flight deck."

The flight deck on HMS Queen Elizabeth was covered in tents when WIRED visited in September 2016 because a thermal metal coating was being applied by robots to protect it from the heat blast of the jets as they land. (Equipment on the flight deck such as rafts and catwalks are given upgraded heat shielding.) When the standard surface used on current aircraft-carrier flight decks was tested at the BAE lab in Warton it survived for mere seconds.

"It just vanishes," Booth says, "and you've just got a bare deck which then would start rusting away, and worse than that, potentially you get blisters which could get ingested into aircraft."

Christoffer Rudquist

Under the water, propulsion is being tested on HMS Queen Elizabeth. There are four diesel generators and two MT30 gas turbines in each ship. Each of them can run independently in case one area is damaged and generate a combined 110mW of power, 80mW of which is used for propulsion - the remainder is for lighting, radar, heat, dehumidification and so on. "It's designed to plod around on its diesels most of the time," Booth says. "So they're big thumping diesels that just love chugging away around the ocean, that's what she runs on. To go faster you turn the gas turbines on." Then he adds: "But it's a bit thirsty when you do that. It's like having your foot down in your car, it drinks a bit of gas."

The gas turbines are essential when it comes to flight operations. The key to naval air power is getting planes in the air quickly (the Royal Navy won't give an estimated time). The planes need lift to take off; to make sure they get enough to carry heavy payloads, carriers point into the wind during launch and sail at maximum speed. The ship's two MT30 gas turbines will provide the boost needed to make sure that the planes have the lift to achieve their full potential. Other design elements to achieve rapid launch of aircraft are the quick route from pilots' quarters to their planes, and the two aircraft lifts which can carry two planes each, speeding up the process of getting planes from hangar to flight deck and vice versa. Kyd compares it to a game of Tetris.

"The sortie generation drives everything," he says. "Right aircraft, right pilot, right weaponry. The officer on watch needs to be going in the right direction, the right wind, the right machinery configuration. It's too late if the aircraft's ready to rev up and fly and you've only got four diesels online as the MT30s take six minutes to wind up. Too late. Bollocking. We've missed the slot, you know. Sortie-generation rate; the bomb's not going to be on target at the right time."

All US aircraft carriers are nuclear powered, but not UK carriers. Nuclear-powered carriers only need refuelling once over their 50-year lifespan, compared to the Queen Elizabeth-class, which will need refuelling every 10,000 nautical miles. The downside of nuclear power is the cost of decommissioning, which can add up to many hundreds of millions of pounds. There are other limitations, too - some countries won't allow a nuclear-powered vessel into their harbours, for instance.

"Nuclear is not the panacea that everyone thinks it is," Kyd says. "Yes, you don't need to take fuel, but you're taking fuel from the tanker for your aircraft anyway, so all we do is put an extra pipe across at the same time and refuel that way. The cost of nuclear ownership is huge and, quite frankly, when you look at through-life costings as a country, we couldn't afford it even if we wanted it. I'm absolutely convinced that we made the right decision. It was quickly assessed and quickly put out of the options, because it's not worth the money. It doesn't give you extra capability at sea. It doesn't give you any extra surety of power. The ship needs to go 25 knots - we can do that."

Christoffer Rudquist


Not needing to manage a nuclear power plant also helps achieve a lean crew - a key requirement for the MoD. According to Kyd's figures, the 65,000-tonne Queen Elizabeth will have a crew of 733 (without air group staff - there are 1,600 bunks in total), compared to 726 on the Invincible class (22,000 tonnes) and 3,200 on the nuclear-powered American Ford class carriers (100,000 tonnes). To achieve that figure, the Queen Elizabeth class is pioneering automation: for example, the ship's 3,000 compartments are monitored using visual and thermal cameras, and automated "moles" transport munitions from the magazines to the planes.

It might seem contradictory to commission such big ships despite them having small crews and operating STOVL aircraft which don't need a big flight deck to launch and land. The size is due to the need to potentially refit for cats and traps if necessary. As Kyd says, it also gives the ship greater flexibility, not just in terms of the number of aircraft it can carry - he says it could carry more than 70 F-35Bs - but also the type of operations it supports (helicopters and Royal Marines for example) and potential innovations: "In the future you may see rack-and-stacking of tens, if not hundreds of UAVs," he says.

A team of divers has been practising attaching the two huge propellers. Once completed, HMS Queen Elizabeth will head out for sea trials in early 2017. Meanwhile, Atkinson and his team are working towards flight clearance in time for Elizabeth's arrival on the east coast of America in late 2018 for flight trials. The ship will assemble its strike group - destroyers, helicopters, support vessels - by 2020, and its first deployment will be in 2021. As Kyd says: "That's our showcase as a country for this carrier."