Naval History Forums

An interesting article at:
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htnava ... 10601.aspx

The British know from experience that it's easier to train new pilots with experienced Royal Navy carrier pilots. Thus the need to maintain that experience by having British aviators flying F-18s off American carriers until the new British carriers arrive.

This is a way of maintaining such experience - but with only four pilots??

It graphically shows how much the defence of the UK is based on the USA and American forces. This dependency is even more a dangerous policy than the reliance on appeasement in the mid 1930's. Both of these strategies are being conducted by Conservative governments whose main aim is to ''save money'' - and it is sacrificing our long term interests.

Well 4 pilots can train quite a few others once the capability comes back. Of course one has to hope those 4 don't retire.

I have to agree that it is quite strange not to keep something on the order of a full squadron operational. Honestly it seems like the only reasonable way to have dealt with this situation (which is itself absolute crap) would have been to keep a training squadron (or maybe half squad) running in the meantime. Avoids retraining on an aircraft never to be used operationally, avoid the likely demand from the Americans to buy the aircraft if a full squadron is wanted and arguably would even give some kind of emergency fallback aviation capability to the helicopter carriers until the new ships come online all at a pretty low cost.

lwd wrote:Well 4 pilots can train quite a few others once the capability comes back. Of course one has to hope those 4 don't retire.

With a concomitant time lag in doing that training before new pilots are available....

Apparently it's not just US carriers:
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htnava ... 10625.aspx
While this does mean that for a while the RN will be a bit light in combat aviation it also gives them the ability to compare the methods and techniques of the US, French, and British systems and when they reconsititute the British capablity take the best from all three. One just hopes they don't need the capability too badly in the short term.

lwd wrote:. One just hopes they don't need the capability too badly in the short term.

This is the whole crux of the issue - especially if it is a situation in which Britain is on its own, without other NATO support.