The BBC yesterday speculated whether the credit crunch will affect the building of the two new aircraft carriers - Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. Now I suspect that for mainly political reasons - some of the yards are in Labour heartlands (or at least were - its called Scotland!) - the ships will be built but one issue that seems to have missed everyone is the fact that the aircraft are American F-35s. We are planning to spend £6,000m on these aircraft which translated into $12,000m until recently. Unfortunately the pound has nosedived against the dollar and the same amount of dollars will cost us £8,000m.
Firstly where is the extra £2,000m coming from?
Secondly the general costs of the F-35 have doubled and other countries might well pull out especially in a downturn, which in turn will increase the costs of the remaining.
So what will happen? Options I suspect might well be navalise the Typhoon, F-18s or maybe Rafales .... or build the carriers but have nothing to fly from them ......
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Replacing the F-35B with either Rafale or Hornet will entail a change of flight deck design - the ships as designed are to be built with the flight deck configured for Short Take-Off/Vertical Landing (STOVL) using a "ski-jump".
However, the RN say the design of the ships is intended to be flexible enough to enable the flight deck to be reconfigured to a Conventional Take-Off and Landing (CTOL) angled deck if necessary.
My bet is we'll get yet another Labour dogs breakfast that's neither fish nor fowl and can't handle either type of lanch/recovery properly.
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