Asian Jumbo
Monthly Donor
Yeah but she didn’t send a gun boat to burn the White House which was a bit wimpy
HMS EAGLE in the Falklands
- Thread starter flasheart
- Start date
She should have sent a handbag with a note saying I'll be there later to pick this up
Pretty much hit the nail on the head there. Unlike ARK ROYAL which needed something close to a full rebuild lasting a number of years modifying EAGLE to operate the Phantom would have been a much quicker and cheaper affair (estimated at £5 million compared to the £30+ million spent on ARK ROYAL) seeing as she had already been somewhat modernised and was generally in a much better material state. Whereas ARK needed a lot of work done to her flight deck equipment, a near total electrical system replacement and machinery overhauls all EAGLE really needed to operate the Phantom would have been some improvements to her flight deck equipment such as strengthened aircraft catapults and jet blast defectors. in fact the only external differences between the EAGLE of TTL and OTL is the addition of bridle catchers on the bow and a larger Flyco on the bridge wing somewhat resembling the one on ARK ROYAL.
The partial grounding incident happened in the narrow channel of Plymouth Sound during an entry to harbour when one of her propellers struck the side of the channel during a mistimed manoeuvre wreaking the propeller shaft. The damage while not crippling would need to be repaired and would necessitate a period of drydocking. Hence the logical choice was to do this as part of the planned refit to minimise disruption. However the cost of the repairs pushed the estimated refit costs up to approximately £40 million. This was considered unaffordable and unjustifiable when the plan at the time was to decommission all of the RN's carriers and abandon fixed wing flying within the next few years. Scrapping EAGLE at that time freed up vast amounts of money and personnel and made it cheaper to run ARK ROYAL seeing as any spare parts needed could simply be sourced from EAGLE rather than having to pay for new. Arguably the only reason why ARK lasted as long as it did was through having EAGLE as a donor of out of production parts.
Most groundings and collusions at sea are a consequence of human error where someone takes their eye off the ball for a few seconds or gets distracted at just the wrong moment or makes a miscalculation. The collusion that led to the recent sinking of the Norwegian Frigate HNoMS HELGE INGSTAD is good example of this.
ITTL the POD is that the error that led to EAGLE's partial grounding doesn't occur meaning that there is no longer a reason to cancel her refit meaning. The result is that the RN ends up with two Phantom capable aircraft carriers with EAGLE being viewed as the more reliable of the pair. ARK ROYAL is the first of the pair to be withdrawn due to her comparatively poorer condition and operating difficulties and also to free up men, material and money to keep EAGLE going. As mentioned early in the TL before the Falklands conflict breaks out the original plan for EAGLE was for her to retire in 1982 which would have been approximately 10 years after her Phantomisation refit.
The grounding seems to be what cut OTL EAGLE's career short and owing to the minor changes in decision making required seemed like something that could have been reasonably easily avoided and thus was an ideal POD. Originally I was going to write an ARK ROYAL in the Falklands story but when I started thinking about it having EAGLE survive long enough to take part in the conflict seemed more plausible than coming up with a plausible way for the worn out ARK ROYAL to survive an extra three years.
New update and an alternative generation of new RN Carriers on its way.
mustangforever
Banned
Very interesting, thanks.
That's an understatement !
More detail on the incident here
http://www.godfreydykes.info/PLYMOUTH_DRAKES_ISLAND_A_DANGEROUS_ROUTE_TO_DEVONPORT.htm
For a buoy 150 feet out of its position, the RN lost its final carrier. Makes one think. Had I.G.W Robertson be aware of that blunder, no grounding. The court martial by the way aknowledged that fact and Robertson retained his command until Eagle was retired early 1972.
https://www.pprune.org/rotorheads/print-419023-rotary-nostalgia-thread-73.html
I'm left wondering... had Eagle not grounded (and thrown under a bus), would the Invincibles and Sea Harrier still happen ? How long would Eagle last, could she fight in Gulf War one in '91 ?
That's an understatement !
More detail on the incident here
http://www.godfreydykes.info/PLYMOUTH_DRAKES_ISLAND_A_DANGEROUS_ROUTE_TO_DEVONPORT.htm
For a buoy 150 feet out of its position, the RN lost its final carrier. Makes one think. Had I.G.W Robertson be aware of that blunder, no grounding. The court martial by the way aknowledged that fact and Robertson retained his command until Eagle was retired early 1972.
https://www.pprune.org/rotorheads/print-419023-rotary-nostalgia-thread-73.html
I'm left wondering... had Eagle not grounded (and thrown under a bus), would the Invincibles and Sea Harrier still happen ? How long would Eagle last, could she fight in Gulf War one in '91 ?
Asian Jumbo
Monthly Donor
I say, hang on a bit! We don’t want to go overboard here..! They can be quite useful in a fight, even if they always turn up late, you know...
mustangforever
Banned
There is another solution : the E-1B Tracer or Stoof-with-a-roof. (lmao that nickname...)
Put turboprops and call that an E-1C TurboTracer. France nearly did it in the 80's for the Clems. USN withdrawn the last of them in 77.
We have Turbotracker firebombers while Argentina TurboTracker landed on the Sao Paulo ex Foch in the 2000s.
Readily available, cheap and still 1000 times better than Alizes, Gannet, Shacketons or Skyraiders... antiquated things.
SsgtC
Banned
You don't even need to do that. The reason later versions of the Hawkeye were taller than the "A" model is because the E-2A had a telescoping rotodome for the radar that lowered the dish to allow the Hawkeye to be stuck down into the hangers of the Essex and Midway class carriers. By the time the E-2C was introduced, the Essex class had all been retired and the Midways were about to be. And all the carriers from the Forestall on had taller hangers, so no need for the feature anymore. Reintroduce it for the British aircraft and you're set. The only issue is the length. If Eagle has deck edge lifts, you can hang the tail over the side and make it work. I'm not sure you could fold the tails on a Hawkeye, and the bird is already pretty blunt-nosed
The Tracer might have been better than the AEW Gannet, but 1,000 times better, I very much doubt it.
Although the Gannet's AEW radars were removed from the Skyraiders the RN received via MDAP, it was pointed out by others earlier in the thread that said AEW radars had several upgrades that improved their performance. AFAIK the radars on the E-1A and E-1B had no such upgrades, although I'm prepared to be corrected on that statement.
The Gannet was no more antiquated than the Tracker and its derivatives. It was designed, flown and entered service at about the same time as the Tracker. In one way it was more advanced than the Tracker because it had a turboprop engine and the Tracker had piston engines. Furthermore, the Gannet's Double Mamba produced about the same amount of power as the two Wright R-1820 piston engines on the Tracker.
It's folded wingspan was less than 20 feet resulting in 3 folded Gannets occupying the same amount of floor space as 2 Trackers. Minimising the amount of flight deck and hangar space an aircraft occupied was very important to the Royal Navy.
There's more to it than that.
The February 1966 decision to cancel the CVA.01 class of aircraft carriers and pay off the existing ships by the end of 1975 did not alter the plan to Phantomize Ark Royal AND Eagle.
Ark Royal entered Devonport to begin her Phantomisation refit in October 1966 and at that time it was still planned to Phantomise Eagle.
This plan was not altered by the 1967 decision to withdraw British forces from East of Suez by the end of 1974.
The game changer was the devaluation of the Pound in November 1967. This led to the announcements that the withdrawal from East of Suez would be brought forward from the end of 1974 to the end of 1971 and that the existing aircraft carriers would be phased out by 1972 instead of 1975.
That was in January 1968. The Phantomisation of Eagle was cancelled because it wasn't cost effective to refit a ship that would be discarded in 1972. The F-4K Phantoms that would have replaced her Sea Vixens were given to the RAF, which used them to re-form No. 43 Squadron in 1969.
I'm also sceptical that the refit would have cost the often quoted £5 million. British warship refits of the era had a habit of taking much longer and costing much more than expected. The contemporary conversions of the Tiger class cruisers were estimated to take 2 years, but ended up taking 4 years and costing more than expected, with the result that the planned conversion of Lion was never carried out. Eagle's big refit was originally intended to last from 1959 to 1962, but ended up being from 1959 to 1964. It also cost more than expected in spite of deleting the replacement of her flight deck armour and replacing her DC electrical system with an AC system from the refit.
Ark Royal's refit had been under way for over a year in January 1968. That's probably why it was completed, in spite of her withdrawal being brought forward from 1975 to 1972, which reduced her projected time as a Phantom carrier from 5 years to 2. However, the Heath Government gave her a reprieve and put her withdrawal date back to 1978.
The grounding didn't help, but the decision to pay of Eagle in 1972 was made in January 1968.
Huh? The E-2C achieved IOC in 1973, Midway was not retired until 1991, she just kept them on deck. The other problem with the E-2A (which never actually operated from an ESSEX) was that the design requirement to be able to fit it in the hangar of the older carriers meant it was something of a lemon from the start and only 59 were built. That's the problem with trying to shoehorn all of your capabilities in an airframe that is artificially smaller than it should be, you know, kind of like the F-35B forcing design compromises on the A and C models.
SsgtC
Banned
For some reason, I was thinking the C model entered service later than that. Still, at the time it was introduced, the plan was to retire the Midways by the late 70s/early 80s. And you'll get no argument from me that the A model had issues. When it worked, it was an amazing aircraft and was light-years ahead of the Tracer. The problem was, it didn't work enough. IIRC, overheating of the electronics was a major problem with the E-2A. The telescoping mount though doesn't seem to have been an issue, as the E-2Bs were rebuilt A models and they presumably still had the telescoping mount.
mustangforever
Banned
AFAIK the Gannet had APS-20 when the Tracer had APS-82. Not sure if the higher digit make the radar more advanced.
I still take issue with your statement that the Tracer was 1,000 times better than the Gannet.
I still assert that the Tracer was as antiquated as the Alize, Gannet and Shackleton.
In one way the Tracer was considerably less advanced than the Alize and Gannet. They had turboprops whose development began in the 1940s and the Tracer was fitted with a piston engine that had been in production since the 1930s. Even the Shackleton has a marginal claim to being less antiquated than the Tracer in that regard because the Griffon engine didn't go into production until the 1940s although its development began in the 1930s.
Ah! the wonderful Shackleton, thirty two thousand rivets flying in approximate formation!!
mustangforever
Banned
hyperbola my dear, hyperbola... and if you PT-6A turboprops on a Turbotracer not Tracer there is a huge gain. And with two engines on the wings there is a lot more room for crew radar in the fuselage. On top of that both Gannet and Alisee were build for ASW with AEW as an afterthough. Ok so was the Tracker but in its case the classic twin engine layout had more room to cram AEW inside.
None of those was ideal AEW platform, the E-2 was.
The problem is that on smaller carriers operating the E-2 is problematic. Even on the Midways which were still pretty damn big they had to be kept on deck. Modifying the E-2 so it could operate off the smaller carriers (basically the E-2A) creates a host of other problems because you are trying to force feed your requirements into an airframe that doesn't want to be force fed.
The smaller carriers need something smaller than an E-2, either a new airframe or a modification of the old frame (Turbo Tracer sounds like a good idea I guess) and you shouldn't let the perfect (constant comparisons to the E-2C) be the enemy of the good enough.
mustangforever
Banned
thanks. It is pretty hard to find valuable data on the E-1B and its flaws notably. Main issue was the lack of radar operators barely 5 with a big workload. Plus performance climb speed must have been bad, it was an aerodynamic horror. Now with turboprops and a lighter more modern radar it should get better. Shame the E-2 ate it but both were Grumman and the small carriers were gone so E-2 triumphed.
Had Essex and British carriers survived along the Clems it might have been different...
France nearly bought E-1B in the 60's I've found bit of info on Google books recently. Shazam, find it again - see attached picture.
Second atempt in the late 80 's before the CdG got E-2s. This was no E-1B (they were gone since 1977) but actually re-inventing it. Tracker airframes similar to the Sécurité Civile firebombers (still in service nowadays !) with the Mirage 2000-5 RDY radar or... the Sea king AEW Searchwater radar ! On a nose radome, a bit like the AEW Defender.
Common sense prevailed and we bought Hawkeyes.
Had Essex and British carriers survived along the Clems it might have been different...
France nearly bought E-1B in the 60's I've found bit of info on Google books recently. Shazam, find it again - see attached picture.
Second atempt in the late 80 's before the CdG got E-2s. This was no E-1B (they were gone since 1977) but actually re-inventing it. Tracker airframes similar to the Sécurité Civile firebombers (still in service nowadays !) with the Mirage 2000-5 RDY radar or... the Sea king AEW Searchwater radar ! On a nose radome, a bit like the AEW Defender.
Common sense prevailed and we bought Hawkeyes.
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From the standpoint of upgrading E-1s, C-1s, and S-2s with turboprops, it has been done for the state of California and it was going to be done for the Brazilian Navy although their carrier program now tango uniform, I imagine that is going nowhere fast:
https://defense-update.com/20141223_brazils_turbo_traders.html
https://defense-update.com/20141223_brazils_turbo_traders.html