Posted on 10/31/2010 11:00:28 AM PDT by Nachum
The French aircraft carrier which is set to play a key role in defending Britain over the next decade has broken down. As President Nicolas Sarkozy prepares to use a London summit this week to announce that RAF jets will fly from the carrier Charles de Gaulle, his naval chiefs have told him that she is no longer seaworthy. ‘She is meant to be heading to Afghanistan but is instead in her home port with a faulty propulsion system,’ said a French Navy source.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
They were practicing with our carriers for a reason.
Then, the recent strikes cost them $550 million Euros a day & that was more than likely factored into the budget, leading to the “failed” engine.
Ah the difference between them and us. We lost use of a shaft and stayed mission ready at one point. We also lost an entire MMR due to a DFT line rupturing into #5 switchboard. We kept on trucking.
Carriers built right and properly maintained can endure a lot of incidents and work around them. Sad to say though even the U.S. Navy in the past 20 years has fallen from those standards to where at least three carriers due to serious propulsion readiness issues could not get underway. These were due to the Pentagon not allowing needed shipyard repairs most likely or were bothched like the JFK's was. Our readiness woes began about the time of Desert Storm. At 9/11 it bit us good.
I served on board the JFK back in the seventies.
No longer sea worthy? The wine cellar must be empty.
Note that the nuclear reactor isn't mentioned. The rest of the system - steam turbines, gear reduction assemblies and propeller shafts - is dead simple. IIRC, the French are planning on collaborating with the Brits on future carriers... or at least they *were* before the world economy hit a reef. From what I recall of the article I read, the U.K./French vessels would all be based on the Queen Elizabeth class of British vessels and would have a substantially different reactor design that that used on the Charles de Gaulle.
The shipyards at Brest have been building naval vessels for quite a long time. Was this France's first attempt at nuclear propulsion?
JFK repairs, remember the superheater problems after the yards in Philly, but I think you are talking about something else. The s/h weld problems were in the late 70’s.
Jack
Midway could take a hit or two, 12 boilers. A good hit in the butt would have hurt her as much as it would any other ship though.
Jack
And it's going to be defending the UK against what, exactly? The only threats to the UK I'm aware of are all internal.
If it was from 77 on I was on the America then. Both JFK and AMERICA got done dirty by The Pentagon. Both had shortened lives because of it. JFK's S.L.E.P. which was done in Philly got botched. Part of what lead to the post 9/11 fiasco.
The AMERICA was denied S.L.E.P. and irresponsibly deliberately ran to an early grave during Desert Storm and imediately after. At one point before deployment to the MED and PG she was without radar, unable to pump fuel correctly, and operating on two of six generators. When she came back she had an explosion in a MMR so serious she had to be towed Cold Iron up to Portsmouth for a band-aid and made one more deployment following that before decomm.
What was done to those ships was inexcusable and back in our time some stars would have came off some Pentagon Princes sleeves as well as SEC NAV and CNO fired. There was nothing wrong with the Kitty Hawk and JFK Class carriers. Their design and hulls were done right. The fact Kity hawk made it to her expected end of service period says as much.
There is the ‘Islas Malvinas’. But somehow I don’t think the French carrier will be very helpful there.
That was part of it. The rest was she was used as a reserve but underway carrier for a better part of the 90's and 2000. She didn't get the funding needed for yard repairs. In the end several years before decomm she was basically cannibalized by some accounts. Basically though I was talking about the two carriers after 9/11 unable to get underway due to plant issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_F._Kennedy_%28CV-67%29 Read the part about 2000.
BTW here's and interesting one. Forestall was the last carrier to have a 600# plant. The plant design for the ships to follow were 1200# but also Forestall Class carriers. Saratoga was the first 1200# system carrier.
What Britain ought to do is scrap her navy altogether, convert the island into one giant unsinkable aircraft carrier, and let America and Canada do the fighting for her (like it's been for sixty years) while building overcomplicated fighters and bombers (like it's been for sixty years).
Besides, given Britain's current geopolitical trends, I'd say a ship that sinks itself would be more appropriate.
"Poppy" Bush, "Big Dick" Cheney, and their bevy of bustling Ivy League bean counters.
Need I say more? Run down the Fleet, economic ruin, the "Greenspan put" => epic moral hazard ......
But blue-haired ladies in Park Avenue apartments got their taxes cut, and Goldman is golden.
And the Russians are buying ships from the French?
Do you actually believe the crap ypu post?.
Wow! How the mighty have fallen. Britain now needs the Frenchies to defend them? Good Lord. If I were a Brit I’d be profoundly embarrassed. What has happened to the Royal Navy?
This pretty well shows it. This was not but maybe 25% Clinton's fault as a carrier does not get this bad in that short a period. The conditions described would have had to have been maybe spring 1993 before the August deployment. Not that Clinton did anything about it either even with a two house GOP majority who allowed these issues on other carriers to continue.
AUGUST 10, 1993 Below Decks
The America needs constant attention. Commissioned in 1965, it is showing its age. A month before leaving Norfolk, a senior enlisted crew member complained to his congressman: The ship was operating on only two of its six electric generators, without radar and unable to pump fuel. This would be its third six-month cruise in three years, and without the standard 18 months at home for repairs, salt water and full steaming had taken their toll.
One source to me an E-9 wrote the letter. I believe the conditions stated and a Freeper who was onboard in that time frame said it was accurate. I know this myself. Two of five or six generators would mean no Radar. It would mean so because there would be no air conditioning for the electronics except the gyro which was independently back up cooled. I worked on the A/C that cooled it myself. I knew that ships A/C system. The main chillers require 1200 amps at least and on the big unit roughly 1800 amps at 460 volts to lite off. Chillers were the larges single power consumer except possibly the elevators. My bet is on the chillers. They require 175-300 amps at 460 volts to run. Six Chillers rated at 200 tons, three chillers at 150 tons, and one new one installed during the 1980 overhaul IIRC 300 tons. I signed for much of the shipyard work done on the chillers in that overhaul. Only myself and another man were qualified too.
The fuel issue puzzles me but IIRC the pumps were spaced out and some may not have been operable. I worked in what they called Test Lab a couple of months which handled that but not enough to recall specifics.
With those described conditions the ship should have never left Norfolk. The fact it did make it back from that third deployment and then the explosion happened at the pier at N.O.B. was a miracle in itself.
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