French-Built Rafales Jets Are To Be Used On Britain's Aircraft Carriers

The Rafale, built by French aeronautics constructer Dassault.
(Photo: Reuters)

Politicians Hide Their Plans To Put French Jets On Royal Navy Carriers -- The Telegraph

The Royal Navy won't be flying Anglo-US Joint Strike Fighters, but providing a platform for French Rafales as part of an EU force, writes Christopher Booker.

The magnificent military pageantry of the royal wedding coincided, sadly, with yet another humiliating instance of the precipitate decline in Britain’s military power. There has long been something very odd about the two giant aircraft carriers which are to be the centrepiece of Britain’s defence capability over the next 50 years – one to be instantly mothballed, the other not due in service for another decade. Now, it seems, the bill for this project is to rise yet again, by further billions of pounds, because, according to the Ministry of Defence, one carrier needs extensive modification to accommodate the Joint Strike Fighters we are allegedly building with the US.

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My Comment: The U.K. and France agreed to an understanding last year to work more closely in military matters. If this report is true, I guess they are putting substance to what they discussed a few months ago.

Building A British Aircraft Carrier Is No Easy Task

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Aircraft Carrier: A Mind-Boggling Building Job -- BBC

In a shipyard in Scotland the future of the Royal Navy is slowly taking shape. But the construction of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is a mammoth task.

Imagine an aircraft carrier as a 65,000-tonne jigsaw puzzle and you have got a good idea of the scale of the building of HMS Queen Elizabeth.

The pieces are being built at six shipyards around the UK and will be slotted together at Rosyth in Fife using an enormous crane which was transported by sea from China.

Around 10,000 workers across Britain are employed on the £5bn project with up to 25,000 engaged in building components for the Lockheed Martin F-35 aircraft.

The carrier will have between 12 and 40 F-35s, or Joint Strike Fighters, costing around £65m each.

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My Comment: Forget about what it takes to build the HMS Queen Elizabeth, just look at how big a Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier is .... and be more impressed on what it takes to build one of those. On a side note, the zoomable image at the bottom of this BBC report is a cool thing to use .... check it out.