There was a flurry of last-minute activity as we finished storing and getting provisions this morning, before the ship sailed at 0930. As we were going out to work, as it were, we had no ceremonial when we left, just slipped quietly away to the south into a fairly dull morning. Once clear of the immediate vicinity of the port, we picked up speed rapidly and headed down to the south east to start work in the Portsmouth sea areas. We are still doing tracking trials for the various radar fits and the associated computer systems, and also for the Vulcan/Phalanx CIWS and the Sea Dart.
The latter is the weapon that proved so successful in tests on Invincible, but has the major disadvantage, in the sort of conflict situation that we may yet be involved in, of a fairly slow acquisition rate of targets, and it can easily get ‘swamped’ by too many attackers. The Vulcan/Phalanx is a very different kettle of fish. It is designed from the outset as a last-ditch weapon or, as the current euphemism has it, a ‘point-defence weapon’, and as such has an effective range of only five miles. Basically, it looks around constantly for trade, using its own very high definition radar incorporating Doppler cut-out circuits to eliminate the effect of waves.
Once it sees a target, which by definition means something travelling towards the ship at a speed between 200 knots and 1500 knots at any angle measured from the horizontal between +80 and -25, it tells the tracking radar, which in turn swings the gun round to the approximate target bearing, and simultaneously tells the Operations Room that it has acquired a target and is tracking it. Split seconds later (literally) the gun will start to fire – a stream of twelve millimetre shells at 3000 rounds a minute, firing in up to six second bursts, each of which is self-tracked by the gun, with minute corrections applied whilst firing. The shells are depleted uranium, a very heavy metal but without a radioactive component, and rely upon sheer momentum and mass to smash the target out of existence.
The gun which fires them is a twenty millimetre cannon, the difference in diameter between the barrel and the bullet being filled by a three-piece plastic sabot (boot or shoe) which breaks away from the bullet on exiting the barrel, as does an aluminium plate at the base of the bullet, used to provide maximum sealing and, hence, velocity. By all accounts it should prove very effective. I just hope we don’t actually need to use it for real.
The first of our squadrons have started to arrive, with two aircraft from 814 NAS (Naval Air Squadron), flying ASW Sea Kings, and Robin Johnson also returned to us with his HDS (Helicopter Delivery Service) Wessex 5. We also saw our first Sea Harrier on board, flown, oddly enough, by an Australian Navy pilot, Lieutenant Commander Ramsey RAN, which came and did some deck landings and a few Carrier Controlled Approaches (CCAs) – I did one and Paul Harvey did the others – Paul will, in all probability, be doing most of them in future.
And here’s a pause for thought.
We are sitting in the most modern ship the Royal Navy has ever owned, because by definition it’s so brand-new that in some places I swear the paint is still wet. The vessel has been designed from the outset to operate Sea Harrier fighter jets. That’s why there’s a ski jump at the end of the six hundred foot runway, so that the aircraft can get into the air as easily and efficiently as possible. Once a Sea Harrier has been launched from the ship, a process of logical deduction will probably allow you to reach the reasonable conclusion that the aircraft might at some point wish to return to the ship.
So far, so good. It is also a fact that weather conditions can deteriorate, and it is at least conceivable that even if the aircraft launches on a flat calm sea in brilliant sunshine, by the time it returns to Mother the weather could be significantly worse, and possibly the pilot of the Harrier might require a little bit of help in either finding the ship or making a safe approach to it, if it’s foggy, for example. And it’s also the case that when the sun goes down, it gets dark, and so again the pilot may require some assistance.
Taking all that lot as a given, and bearing in mind as I said right at the beginning of this section that the ship is brand new, you might well think that we would have on board the very latest precision recovery aids that would enable us to recover Sea Harriers and helicopters in any weather conditions, no matter how bad.
And if you think that, you will of course be wrong.
When Paul or I carry out a CCA, we have to do it on the aft navigation radar which is designed for, oddly enough, navigation, not for the recovery of aircraft. The radar display is a standard round tube with the timebase rotating clockwise about its centre. In order to carry out the recovery, we have to offset the origin of the radar as far over to the left as we can, enable sector scan so that it will only radiate towards the approach path at the stern of the ship, and then mark on this display, using a chinagraph pencil, a series of vertical lines from left to right. These represent the distance behind the ship in miles when we hope we will be able to see the Harrier as it approaches.
You will note that there is no elevation component in this equation, and that’s because, as I said before, we have no precision radar. That means that we calculate the approach of the Harrier using a theoretical three degree glide slope, the aircraft losing roughly three hundred feet for every track mile run, so that when it is at, say, three miles, we say into the radio ‘Three miles, you should be passing nine hundred feet’.
We have no idea on the ship whether he’s at nine hundred feet, nine thousand feet or even, come to that, nine feet. It’s not what you might call a terribly satisfactory system, and I’m frankly surprised that it works as well as it does. And the reason it does work, I think, is because the pilots trust us to keep them on the theoretical centreline, and we make absolutely sure that we pass accurate ranges. Or as accurate as we can bearing in mind the limitations of the equipment.
And there’s a final wrinkle in this particular setup which is somewhat hard to believe. That’s the fact that the aft navigation radar, purely because it is a navigation radar, is incapable of picking up a Harrier as a primary radar return. This means that the Harrier has to be able to radiate a secondary radar response in order for us to be able to see it on the radar and talk it down, and that when we are talking down the aircraft, we’re actually talking down a secondary radar transponder. The upshot of all this is that if a Harrier ever launches in marginal weather conditions, the first thing the pilot does is carry out a circuit of the ship, staying in visual contact, with his secondary radar transponder switched on, and if he’s not detected on the navigation radar, his mission is scrubbed and he has to burn off enough fuel to get down to landing weight and then recover to the ship. The transponder is a go/no go item in those conditions.
By any standards it’s a cobbled together, ad hoc, kind of make do arrangement that really does make you wonder if the Naval architects who designed the ship have got the slightest idea what they’re doing.
And we’re fairly convinced that they haven’t, and not just because of that.
Shortly after I arrived in Newcastle to stand by the ship as the work on it approached its finale, we had a slight dispute with the Naval architects over the briefing rooms. The ship is designed to carry both fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft, and in consequence has two briefing rooms for the two squadrons. Both rooms are the same size, and at first sight appear quite impressive, fitted with comfortable reclining chairs for the audience, arranged in tiered seating.
For the Harrier squadron, this is absolutely ideal, because the Harrier is a single pilot aircraft and so if you’re briefing a Combat Air Patrol (CAP) sortie, there will probably be four pilots in the room, plus a fighter controller, maybe an air traffic controller and that’s about it. They could have two seats each, in all probability.
But step next door to the rotary wing briefing room, and it’s all rather different. Each Sea King carries a crew of four, and if you’re briefing for a typical Ripple Three antisubmarine warfare (ASW) exercise, there’ll be a minimum of four crews in there, making sixteen people, plus probably two or three helicopter controllers, and maybe the next two crews involved in the exercise. You can easily get to between twenty and thirty people attending a rotary wing briefing, and they all need to be there.
But because there are only seats for about twelve people, most of them will have to stand, and that, we decided, was not acceptable. The only option was to take out the expensive recliners and replace them with basic, simple and efficient bench seating. So we told the Naval architects that that was what we needed to do. And they told us that we couldn’t, because the expensive reclining seats had been paid for and by God they were going to stay there. I can only presume that these people were unaware that the ship was about to sail into a literal war zone and that anything which could adversely affect the fighting efficiency of any part of the vessel was unacceptable.
So in the end, we reached what we decided was a good compromise. We had the seats removed from the rotary wing briefing room and placed them carefully on the dockside, because we’d been told that they were expensive and they’d been paid for, and we certainly didn’t want to see them being damaged or anything, and replaced them with basic, simple and efficient bench seats knocked up by the chippies on board. And then we told the Naval architects where the seats were if they wanted to come and collect them. And we suggested that they hurried, because it looked like it was going to rain.
I set a new personal record tonight – I finally finished work at 2315.