Posted on 11/11/2013 8:01:23 AM PST by MBT ARJUN
The long-delayed $2.3-billion aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya (Admiral Gorshkov) will be inducted into the Indian Navy by defence minister AK Antony during his Russia visit slated between November 15 and 17.
The 45,000-tonne Kiev class warship, rechristened by the Navy as Vikramaditya, sailed out of the Sevmash shipyard in northern Russia in July this year for trials. After ‘sustained full-power’ trials, it will now return to the shipyard for final polish and will be ready for handover to the Navy on November 15, when the defence minister visits Russia, MoD sources said.
Antony will ‘accept’ the aircraft carrier on November 15 ahead of the sailing and it’s expected to reach India in December end or early January year, officials said. The minister will also attend the meeting of the Indo-Russian Inter-Governmental Commission on Military Technical Cooperation (IR-IGCMTC) held every year, alternately in the two nations, where future cooperation in defence issues is decided.
He will discuss a number of deals, including issues related to the ongoing Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft being developed by Russia jointly with Hindustan Aeronautics.
The visit was earlier scheduled to take place in the third week of October, but due to ill-health, Antony was unable to go then. A 1,000-member Indian Navy crew and technical team, headed by a two-star officer, is already in Russia to take delivery of the warship.
Once inducted, it will be the second aircraft carrier in the Navy after INS Viraat, giving India a strategic advantage in the Indian Ocean. Vikramaditya, which was scheduled to be delivered in 2008, was supposed to have been handed over to India on December 4, 2012, but sea trials in September that year revealed the ship’s boilers were not fully functional.
Vikramaditya was bought by India in 2004 for R4,500 crore and sent to Sevmash in the Severodvinsk port-city off the White Sea for a refit that year. Since then, the shipyard haggled for a price hike for the refurbishing work and forced India to pay it nearly R13,000 crore in 2010 after a three-year negotiation, resulting in acrimony in bilateral ties.
India had also bought a 45-aircraft MiG-29K combat plane that would operate from aboard Vikramaditya and the first batch of 16 of these planes have already been delivered and are currently based at INS Hansa naval air base in Goa.
Vikramaditya is a key component of Indian Navy’s plans to operate at least two aircraft carriers on both the western and eastern seaboards in the future, as power projection platforms in the Indian Ocean Region, along with its Indigenous Aircraft Carriers (IACs) of the Vikrant class being built at Kochi. The first of
the three Vikrant-class ships was launched in the waters on August 12 at the Cochin Shipyard and is slated for induction by 2018
The Russkies under bid us again? Why aren’t we making them for export?
Well, gosh, golly! Why didn’t President You Didn’t Build That just sell the Indian navy the new Gerald Ford aircraft carrier? After all, it’s not needed, is it?
The Indian Navy is becoming serious players/allies in both the warfare against the Pirates on the high seas and more importantly against the expanding Chinese Asian sphere...
If you like your carrier, you can keep your carrier. Period....President Putin
Why does this ship remind me of Bob Hope?
Powered by red caked curry powder.
Ha!
interesting design
I can’t tell. Does that ship have a catapult system? A curved catapult system would seem tricky to engineer. If not, it seems they would need to whole deck to launch and thereby, the whole deck to recover. No staging of planes.
I want to know how it works (more than planes take off, planes land....).
This wasn't a new ship, it was a rebuild of a old Russian ship. Our last conventional carriers were made 50 years ago and are far larger than this. I don't think we'd sell them even if someone was crazy enough to buy.
I’m okay with the Indians having a more expansive navy. They are a strange wild card in the global community. They aren’t for the West, they aren’t for the Middle East, and they aren’t for China. India is for India. In the case that tensions get worse between the US and the ME or China, they are a nice stress point to keep them looking over their shoulder.
I assume our costs are far too high.
I know all the cruise ships are built offshore, and the big container ships.
The only reason we're doing domestic stuff is domestic content provisions in military contracts.
That’s some serious uplift at the end of that takeoff runway.
Is that going to slow them down at a point when they really need the speed?
Nice comment, India is for themselves only.They are the only country who enjoy preferable treatment from Russia,US and Europe.Just few months back US offered F35 with licence manufacturing to India. On the other hand they are developing PAKFA with russians.
India’s Navy has 180 ships.
The Royal (UK) Navy has 79 ships, of which only 19 - yes, 19 - are warships.
The British Empire has been flipped upside down.
The English have committed national suicide.
Socialism destroys a nation.
No it is Stobar type aircraft carrier.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOBAR
Thanks — got it.
The aircraft carrier has no catapults. The upward curved foredeck is called a ski-jump. The aircraft accelerate up the ramp and achieve a ballistic trajectory and sufficient height for their wings to begin providing lift prior to crashing into the sea. On return, the aircraft land on the angled portion of the flight deck using a conventional arresting gear system.
This ski-jump system has been used for decades on British, Spanish, Thai, etc. “Harrier Carriers.” Its appeal lies in engineering simplicity and low cost - basically it has no moving parts - when compared to the very complex conventional steam catapult systems used in U.S, French, and, until they scrapped them, British aircraft carriers.
The Soviets took the concept a step farther by adapting it to full-size Conventional Take Off and Landing (CTOL) aircraft like the Su-33 (navalized version of the Su-27), MiG-29K (navalized version of the MiG-29 (India is acquiring this aircraft along with the carrier) and a navalized version of the Su-25. These aircraft have the very significant thrust-to-weight ratios needed to acheive the needed acceleration. My understanding is that even then their useful military load is somewhat reduced by the lower speed the aircraft achives flight at (120-140 mph) when compared to their payloads when flying from land bases with their longer runways.
The Russians have only one aircraft carrier, the RFS Kuznetsov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admiral_Kuznetsov), which is puny in size when compared to U.S fleet aircraft carriers. The larger Ulyanov class was cancelled immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union but the Chinese have announced plans to build two carriers based on the design in the future (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_aircraft_carrier_Ulyanovsk).
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