In the Rosyth dockyard in Scotland, final works are being carried out on HMS Prince of Wales, the Royal Navy’s second supercarrier, following the commissioning of HMS Queen Elizabeth in 2017.
The new ship shares the design of its sister, but with a few tweaks to the process from lessons learned the first time around. “We’re not testing the design this time; we’re testing that we’ve built it completely accurately to the design,” says Vice Admiral Simon Lister, who is managing director of the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, a partnership between industry and the Ministry of Defence that is responsible for the construction of the two ships.
At 280 metres long and with a displacement of 65,000 tonnes, the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers are the largest warships ever constructed for the Navy. Building such a large ship, explains Lister, requires distributing construction around the country to manage the throughput of steel. The carriers were built in parts before being assembled at Rosyth using the most powerful crane in Britain, which is capable of lifting 1,000 tonnes and is appropriately named Goliath.
