CVA-01
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Official drawing of the CVA-01
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| Class overview | |
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| Operators: |
 Royal Navy
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| Preceded by: |
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| Succeeded by: | Invincible class |
| Planned: | 2 |
| Cancelled: | 2 |
| General characteristics | |
| Displacement: |
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| Length: | 925 ft (282 m) |
| Beam: | 184 ft (56 m) |
| Draught: | 33 ft (10 m) |
| Propulsion: | 6 Admiralty boilers with 3 Parsons steam turbines providing 135,000 hp (101,000 kW) to three shafts |
| Speed: | 30 knots (56 km/h) |
| Range: | 7,000 nautical miles (13,000 km) |
| Complement: | 3,250 plus airgroup |
| Armament: | 1 twin Sea Dart Guided Weapon System 30 launcher, 4 × Sea Cat GWS 20 |
| Armour: | unspecified for side and underwater protection |
| Aircraft carried: | Up to 50 aircraft, with the planned airgroup having 18 × Phantom FG.1; 18 × Buccaneer S.2; 4 × Gannet AEW.3; 4 × Sea King HAS.1; 2 × Wessex HAS.1 (SAR), probably with 1 × Gannet COD.4 |
| Aviation facilities: | 2 catapults (reduced from 4), 2 lifts, 1 hangar 650 ft (200 m) by 80 ft (24 m) |
The CVA-01 aircraft carrier was to be the first of a class of fleet carriers that would have replaced the Royal Navy's existing aircraft carriers, most of which had been designed prior to or during World War II. CVA01 was intended to replace HMS Victorious and HMS Ark Royal and it was hoped CVA02 and CVA03 would be approved to replace HMS Hermes and HMS Eagle.
Due to the 1966 Defence White Paper the project was cancelled, along with the proposed escort Type 82 destroyers. Inter-service rivalries, the huge cost of the proposed carriers, and the difficulties they would have presented in construction, operation, and maintenance were prime reasons for cancellation. Had these ships been built, it is likely they would have been named HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Duke of Edinburgh or the Invincible class.
In the 1960s, the Royal Navy was still one of the premier carrier fleets in the world, second only to the US Navy which was in the process of building the 80,000 ton Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carriers. The British fleet included the fleet carriers Ark Royal, Eagle, and two much smaller carriers, the completely reconstructed Victorious, and the much newer light carrier Hermes both with 3D 984 radar and C3 but limited to air groups of 25 aircraft, at the most 20 fighters and strike aircraft and 5 helicopters or alternatively 16 fighters and strike aircraft and 4 AEW Gannets turboprops and 5 helicopters. A fifth carrier, Centaur, was modernized to the minimum standard to operate 2nd generation Scimitars and Vixens in 1959, but was never satisfactory or safe for operating nuclear strike aircraft and was a purely interim capability, while Eagle was refitting.
While all four of the Navy's large carriers were capable of operating the S.2 version of the Blackburn Buccaneer strike aircraft, only Ark Royal and Eagle were realistically big enough to accommodate both a squadron of Buccaneers (up to 14 aircraft) and a squadron of F-4 Phantoms, which the Royal Navy intended to procure as its new fleet air defence aircraft. With the remainder of the air group this would give a total of approximately 40 aircraft, which compared poorly to the 90 available to a Kitty Hawk class ship. The increasing weight and size of modern jet fighters meant that a larger deck area was required for take offs and landings. Although the Royal Navy had come up with increasingly innovative ways to allow ever larger aircraft to operate from the small flight decks of their carriers, the limited physical life left in the existing ships (only Hermes was considered capable of reliable and efficient extension past 1975), and the inability of both Victorious and Hermes, the most effectively and expensively modernized of the carriers, to operate the F-4 or an effective and useful number of Buccaneers, made the order of at least two new large fleet carriers essential by the mid 1960s.
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Wikipedia