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Originally Posted by richard s
Nice one Maggy I should have said the air-craft carrier Ark Royal.  |
It’s simplistic to say Ark Royal (Audacious class) was just the victim of cutbacks. It was a WW2 era design that required fairly constant modifications and repairs throughout its service life.
The Invincible class light carriers came into service within 3 years of Ark Royal’s decommissioning, two of them in time for the Falklands war. The government had realised by the mid 1970s that it was a strategic error not to have fixed-wing aircraft launching capability at sea and ordered its new fleet of anti-submarine cruisers, still on the drawing board at the time, to be modified to carry a navalised harrier jump jet. The older HMS Hermes also remained in service at the time of the Falklands war.