Powerful aircraft carrier grounded. Queen Elizabeth will not sail to major NATO exercises

HMS Queen Elizabeth is one of two aircraft carriers in the Royal Navy. It entered service in 2017, two years before its sister unit HMS “Prince of Wales”, but it already has serious problems. The media are wondering whether Great Britain is ready for possible military operations within NATO.

A large British aircraft carrier is stuck in port. Another problem with the screw

Britain’s first heavy aircraft carrier and one of the largest ships since the Civil War is stuck in port due to discovered problems with one of its propellers. These were noticed during a routine inspection before the expedition to the NATO Steadfast Defender 2024 mission. These are large-scale military exercises that are just starting and are intended to check the readiness of the North Atlantic Alliance to defend itself against an anonymous enemy from the East (Russia). We wrote more about exercises in the article below:

The Royal Navy informed about the problem, among others: on Portal X just hours after news that HMS Queen Elizabeth would go to sea to lead an international task force as part of an alliance exercise.

The Royal Navy added that the aircraft carrier would be replaced during the mission by its sister ship, HMS Prince of Wales, which is currently not experiencing any breakdowns. Currently, in August 2022, the ship was turned back shortly after leaving the port of Portsmouth (in southern Great Britain) due to a very similar problem with the propeller – . It then took the British nine months to repair the defect in the aircraft carrier. Some media are wondering whether another failure of one of Great Britain’s flagship ships does not mean that the British are not ready for possible hostilities.

However, according to a Ministry of Defense (MOD) spokesman quoted by the BBC, the currently detected defect in HMS “Queen Elizabeth” is not related to the earlier propulsion failure in HMS “Prince of Wales”. An MOD spokesman explained that the ship’s drive shafts were too large to be made from a single piece of metal. So the engineers used a shaft consisting of three separate elements connected into one system using large clutches. Only such a drive system is able to drive a gigantic propeller weighing 33 tons. MOD clarified that now one of the mentioned clutches has failed.

The British declare that they will repair HMS “Queen Elizabeth” so that the ship can return to work as soon as possible, but no specific dates have been announced. However, sending HMS “Prince of Wales” as a replacement for a sister ship means that the British will not be able to send their own aircraft carrier to the Gulf of Aden area, where Yemen’s Houthi rebels (with the support of Iran) have been attacking (mainly) British and American ships for months. commercial. The BBC writes that HMS “Prince of Wales” was to replace the American aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the region when it returns to the United States.