Shipbucket

erik_t,

Some notes on the lifts from the Sturton article.
The forward lift was of the novel scissors type ('lazy tongs') which had guides on the starboard wall of the hangar so there were no obstruction inside the hangar. It was estimated to save at least half the weight of a conventional chain-driven lift. These were later used on the Invinicbles and gave quite a bit of trouble at first so had CVA-01 been built, it might have been yet another novel system with bugs in it.
The final design was changed from the sketch design in having the forward lift widened from 32ft to 35ft to accommodate F-111B, this cost an additional £45,000, 15 tons extra weight and lost accommodation space for 20 men. I was unaware of this point before reading the article, I don't know how much it accurately reflects aircraft selection at that time. My guess is that someone thought with the F-111B entering USN service then it would have been a logical candidate to replace the F-4s in the 1970s (A fighter/strike F-111KN airwing is a salivating AU idea!).

At least two different arrangements were rejected; a second centreline lift aft would take up too much hangar space and another deck-edge lift forward was thought to be at risk from damage in heavy weather. From the top-view the space looks tight, length would probably have to be increased a little to allow sufficient space behind the starboard catapult.

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If we had built them and given no other changes in history happened what would have replaced phantom/buccaneer?

Realistically they could have carried on till end of cold war, so F18 or a earlier "Future European Fighter Aircraft" (Typhoon/Rafale) ?

Wow! Great work!

Having always been a fan of CVA 01 years ago I got a modelmaker to make me
one in 1/600 scale waterline. Sadly it is based on the old drawings, but he did kit it
out with some models of the Vickers swing wing fighter attacker which was my
favourite candidate for a Sea Vixen/Buc replacement even if it never left the
drawing board

http://ukx-dev.wikia.com/wiki/Vickers_Type_583

Sadly the small picture of my model which used to be on Richard Beedall's excellent site
has vanished.

The model itself is in store at present.

with CVA-01 I do wonder would we have gone American or French to replace Phantom & Buccaneer or would there have been sea Tornado and Sea Typhoon?

It would all depend on the political climate in Britain at the time, I can't see a Sea Tornado or Sea Typhoon, the Germans and Italians had no requirement for carrier operations, a carrier capable Tornado or Typhoon would be completely different from the aircraft we know, the Germans and Italians may well have refused to join the programme as it wouldn't have met their requirements.

An Anglo-French programme is a possibility, perhaps Suez ends differently and Britain moves closer to Europe, if that doesn't come off then an all British aircraft is a possibility but like with the Rafale it would need to replace every fast jet in the RAF and RN, the final option is of course to just buy Hornets. The choice will come down to politics as much as cost.

An Anglo-French program seems like a very strong possibility in that AU. France dropped out of the "Future European Fighter Aircraft" partnership at the start when it was clear no carrier-based variant would be forthcoming. A CVA-01 operating Britain would have largely identical requirements to what France did in reality.

The question is, would the Eurofighter Typhoon exist in any form at all if Britain hadn't been involved? Did Germany and Italy have the capacity to develop such a fighter on their own, or would they have just been forced to either accept the Anglo-French demands that the Eurofighter have a carrier version or give up on local production and buy F-16s?

In a timeline where the RN keeps conventional carriers into the 1990s, a carrier-capable EFA does make sense, but as has been mentioned above, there was no interest in that version except in the UK. Indian export potential comes to mind but would be a remote possibility early in the program.
So while Great Britain splitting from the ground-only EFA program to join the French on a naval-compatible development makes sense, we have to keep in mind that the EFA design is heavily based on British input (the EAP demonstrator, to start with), so a British pullout would have set the program back years or killed it outright.
This being said, I see several factors preventing that outcome:
- The British industry being wary of going it alone with the French, who had already proved an unreliable partner on the program,
- The other industrial partners (chiefly Germany) eager to prevent the program from tanking or the price tag from going up, would be ready to negotiate the design cost allocation around the additional British CATOBAR requirement, considering the added workload would drive the unit cost down.
- The RAF, used to the multilateral Tornado training framework, would push for a replacement program with the same partners.

Taking a step back on the timeline though, it all depends on the expected IOC. My musings above are only relevant in a late-1980s-early-1990s timeframe when both EFA and Rafale programs have congealed a little. Keep the IOC and move the decision five years back, and you can keep the French in with the promise of dedicated joint FR-UK naval-air sub-program. Move the IOC back as well and you are looking at a separate 3rd-gen bi-national program, the easiest contender being a navalized, internationalized Mirage F1 and/or Jaguar-IM. In turn, the land-based evolution of that design would jeopardize any future clean-sheet like the EFA...
Or scratch all that and co-finance a joint lease on a large batch of baseline USN Hornets for an IOC around 1985, pushing back development of the naval EFA/Rafale to around 2000.
Re. politics, I don't see a joint FR-UK program much earlier than the IRL Jaguar (early 1970s), between the British defense cuts and French insistence on national self-reliance.

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Hey, I'm really sorry for necro-ing, but what would the full air wing be for the CVA-01 and the rebuilt Malta?