On (21 Apr 96) Bob Lawrence wrote to Robert Jones...

[....hack....]

 BL>   I know carriers make good targets, but I don't believe you can have

 BL> a serious Navy without one. You just *have* to carry your own fighter

 BL> aircraft, or any second-rate enemy can knock the hell out of you with

 BL> any cheap plane better than a helicopter.



It depends a lot on the aircraft carried on the carrier. Australia would

have had to re-equip its carrier air group and that would have cost billions.

We were using ??????? (known as "Shit-Ducks") and Gruman Trackers at the

time, both useless for a jump-up style carrier. Australias aircraft carriers

role was basically as an anti-submarine roll with the Shit-ducks as a

"fighter-bomber". Shit-ducks could only break the sound-barrier in a dive

but could fly-off a carrier carrying their own weight in ordinance. During

an exercise once, I was working on the bridge of the Melbourne and heard

a radar report of an "enemy" (yank) aircraft picked up on the port beam at

range 50 miles. They scrambled a shit-duck which took 20 minutes to get

going and in the meantime, the "enemy" Phaentom jet put 4 Photo
rockets into

us and disappeared over the horizon at Mach 2. They still flew the shit-duck

to pursue the bogey but the Phantom could have returned to base, refuelled,

re-armed and returned to put another 4 rockets in us by the time the shit-duck

got off.  It takes a hell of a lot of fire-power to defend against modern air

born weapons. The Argies sank 2 billion dollars worth of ship with a $100,000

rocket fired from over the horizon by a 2 million dollar helicopter. 

I think the only good thing to come out of the faulkland conflict was the fact

that as a defence against heat-seeking missiles, the poms put up a chopper

to act as a decoy. One of the queens kids (prince Andrew) was the duty flying

officer at the time and it was him flying the chopper waiting for a possible

attack. The Argies missed out on a perfect opportunity to gain my support

for their cause.

TTFN. Bob.



... I'm only paranoid 'cos EVERYONE is out to get me.



--- PPoint 1.92