BBC: Britain’s two new aircraft carriers are leviathans and an extraordinary feat of British engineering. Standing on board, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer scale.
Inside the labyrinth of passageways – wider and more spacious than those on the older US Nimitz-class carriers – you’ll find a chapel, a hospital and five galleys to feed the 700-plus crew. That figure rises to 1,600 when you add the flight crews, engineers and Royal Marines who might also be on board. Even fully crewed there’s still plenty of room. The generously sized sleeping cabins are a far cry from the cramped conditions of most warships. There are five gyms to burn off the calories, though crew members can clock up 20,000 steps – as far as eight miles (13km) – during their average working day.
The 65,000-tonne HMS Queen Elizabeth is longer than the Houses of Parliament and, from keel to the top of the highest mast, taller than London’s Nelson’s Column. You could fit three football pitches on her massive flight deck. She has been built to carry up to 36 new F-35 stealth jets, as well as helicopters. But in reality she’ll routinely sail with fewer than half that number.
The first jets will fly off her deck in flight trials taking place off the east coast of the US this autumn. And she’ll sail on her first “operational deployment” in 2021.
HMS Queen Elizabeth is like a small town. Her engines could provide enough power to run tens of thousands of homes.
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