Amid all the chaos in the air travel world the combination of Gordon Brown wanting a ‘Falklands Moment’ and the Royal Navy wanting, err, another ‘Falklands Moment’ we have the news that the Royal Navy will be deploying three ships tp help stranded travellers.
HMS Albion will be taking returning Afghanistan personnel from Spain and HMS Ark Royal and HMS Ocean will be supplementing the cross channel routes.
No one seems to have yet defined what HMS Ocean and HMS Ark Royal will be actually be doing but I suppose activity can be an effective substitute for competence. The fact is that Eurostar and the Channel ferry services are operating at summer levels with little problems or fuss also seems to have passed people by.
Ark Royal was on exercise (joint Warrior) which means her decks would likely be full of exercise stores that may now have to be offloaded and she is not expected to be in the area until later today (Tuesday) timed to neatly coincide with the reopening of some flight corridors.
Would a better use of Royal Navy resources be to shuttle stores and personnel between the UK, Spain, Gibraltar, Cyprus or even Turkey in support of the Afghanistan air bridge although one would imagine much of that is happening by land.
Wouldn’t want a maritime nation to go sea blind would we, I mean, it’s not as if we have a Strategic Defence Review on the horizon!
Just to lighten the moment…
I am now taking bets on when the first ‘we are an island’ pundit appears on the news making a case for CVF
Whats the betting some Labour politician will be on hand to welcome HMS Albion back into the UK, a difficult timing issue but the good thing about ships is you can vary the speed to give those onshore plenty of time to get the bunting and TV crews ready
Good point raised by a ferry bigwig this morning, will they be lifting cars and caravans onto the flight deck, He also confirmed there was no capacity problems and if anything the navy ships would get in the way, anyone would think there’s an election coming!!
I’m not quite as cynical though. Much needed PR for the Andrew. Long overdue air time.
Perhaps I am being a tad cynical, you are right a bit of good publicity is only positive for the armed forces as a whole.
Makes a change from running aground and crying over spilt iPods I suppose
all these extra ferries and passengers the somalian pirates are missing a trick there,plus with the royal navy there no chance of being interupted,lest we upset them!!!
It is no doubt a publicity stunt as the actual good the Royal Navy can accomplish is pretty poor as cross channel links such as ferries and the channel tunnel are well established. The main problem is the things needing to be moved are mostly people something which is not ideal for the navy to accomplish. Well they could but I wouldn’t trust most people these days to orderly board something like HMS Ocean and find a place on the hangar deck to sit on their arse contently for a few hours. Supporting the operations in Afghanistan are fine as squaddies can be trusted to behave themselves and equipment can be on and offloaded and were not getting in the way of high density commercial services. The point the ferry bigwig made is pretty much null and void in my opinion as aircraft don’t carry cars and the aircraft are things unavailable so he’s worried about losing fee paying passengers that’s all.
However in the run up to a general election and the next round of silly butchering the armed forces need every last bit of PR they can get especially the Royal Navy. Maybe with aircraft grounded the silly buggers will actually notice we are actually surrounded by water which makes us I think something called and Island. Although using that as a justification for the CVF in particular even I think is a bit dubious and a bit daft although I am personally a big supporter of the CVF.
I read one article earlier where some aviation boss noted that we are an island, but apparently then forgot that air travel is not the only way to cross water and suggested that unless we lift flight restrictions this nations was entirely cut off from the world.
…Seems odd that we managed to rule an empire without ever leaving our tiny cut off island.
Pingback: Dunkirk 2 Publicity Stunt? « New Wars