Illustrious to visit Malta for CHOGM

The aircraft carrier HMS Invincible arrived at Portsmouth last week to pay off and go into reserve. She had earlier visited London as part of her 25th birthday celebrations and had been the flagship of the international fleet review in June to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar with an assembly in the Solent of 170 warships, auxiliaries, merchantships and tall ships representing 36 navies.

HMS Illustrious will be taking over the role of fleet flagship, following her current refit and reconfiguration, to spearhead her role from that of anti-submarine warfare to maritime strike capability. One of her first overseas trips will be to Malta in November for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), when she will be accompanied by the destroyer HMS Exeter.

Also being modifed is HMS Ark Royal, the third Invincible-class carrier, which will rejoin the fleet in 2007.

This is a very uneasy period for the Royal Navy and the future of its carrier programme.

Illustrious and Ark Royal are, under present plans, expected to pave the way for a new era of carrier aviation, which will see the introduction of the new Queen Elizabeth-class carrier and the joint strike fighter.

In the 1960s, the Royal Navy also went through a traumatic period when the decision was taken under the Labour government to scrap the aircraft carrier force and to cancel the CVA-01 programme for the construction of a new Queen Elizabeth-class of carriers, displacing 53,000 tons, the largest ever to be conceived. The carriers in service at the time were Victorious, Hermes, Ark Royal and Eagle.

In February 1966 I received a message at the Times of Malta from naval headquarters in Lascaris bastion, sent by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce. He asked me to meet him at Luqa airport while his aircraft was refuelling on a flight to the United Kingdom from Tehran, where he had negotiated the sale of a number of British-built warships to the Royal Iranian Navy.

I knew the First Sea Lord, having first sailed with him as a journalist when he was captain of HMS Liverpool, soon after the end of the war. He was a submariner and was in command of the submarine HMS Cachalot, which had sunk a U-boat in the Bay of Biscay in 1940.

The Admiral told me of his total opposition to the government's decision to dispense with the carriers. "I am going back to resign," he told me with sadness. "I cannot support any decision to end the operational role of the aircraft carrier."

The announcement was made the following day - and with him the Minister for the Navy, Christopher Mayhew, also resigned. Eventually a hybrid design was conceived for a 'through deck cruiser', the first of which HMS Invincible was commissioned in 1980. She was, in reality, a carrier in design and was soon after equipped with a number of the new vertical-take-off Sea Harriers for operations in the Falklands.

Two other ships of her class came into service soon after, Illustrious in 1978 and Ark Royal in 1981, and the role of the carrier as part of the defence and offensive concept was revived, vindicating the stand taken by Admiral Luce.

Illustrious was in Malta in 1995 for the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war; in command was Captain Jonathon Bond, today the Commander-in-Chief, Fleet. When she arrives in November, her commanding officer will be Captain Bob Cooling. She carries a name that will ever be associated with Malta for her escape from Grand Harbour in January 1941 after several days of concentrated attacks by the Luftwaffe, which destroyed the Three Cities.