HMS Diamond has aborted her deployment to the Gulf and is returning home The Times has reported today.

The Times reported that problems with a propeller could not be fixed at sea despite the efforts of sailors on board.

A Royal Navy spokesman said:

“We can confirm HMS Diamond has experienced technical issues but we do not discuss the detailed materiel state of our operational ships and are unable to comment further.”

Rolls-Royce has been working on a modification for the engines to improve their reliability and is now preparing to take it to sea on a Type 45 for real-world testing.

A spokesman for the company said, discussing the other engineering issues that have impacted the class:

“We’re continuing to work with the MoD, the Royal Navy and our industry partners in supporting the Type 45 fleet in service.

Part of that work has been to carry out a design modification and in recent months we have successfully completed 500 hours of arduous accelerated testing on this at our test facility in Bristol.

The sea trial will test the robustness of the modification in service across a full range of operational and environmental conditions. If the sea trial is successful then we expect the modification to be rolled out across the fleet.”