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Sad Day- HMS Illustrious leaving Pompey to be scrapped today


tonyot

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Not an aeroplane I know,.....but aeroplane orientated,.........`Lusty' leaves Pompey today around 0930hrs so if anybody is in the area it might be worth seeing her one last time before she leaves for Turkey to be transformed into razor blades,

 

Hopefully the Fleet Air Arm (what is left of it) will see her off in style with a flypast.

 

Cheers

           Tony

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The MoD refused the bids for museum use or use as a hotel/casino,........and sold her for two million quid to the same Turkish scrapyard that did away with her two sister ships. Pity she couldn`t even be scrapped in the UK! 

 

Cheers,

             Tony

 

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Oooh scraping ships in UK no chance we haven't got enough project managers for that!

As for musuem ship no chance ....the Belfast survives on money from the city...and a CVS is a bit more complex and who would payfor it......not to mention who would clean the naafi flat!

Have you seen what they charge at the histerical dockyard.

She gone and that's that

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Also:

 

http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/our-region/portsmouth/picture-gallery-lusty-leaves-portsmouth-1-7716189

 

A sad day, but inevitable I suppose. Preserving this size of ship is enormously expensive and labour-intensive, not only at the beginning but across many years - just ask the folks who look after the big ships here in the US. Yes, it can be done, but it is very, very difficult. All very well bemoaning everyone in sight, but unless you have the money and time to invest.......

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1 hour ago, Paul Bradley said:

Also:

 

http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/our-region/portsmouth/picture-gallery-lusty-leaves-portsmouth-1-7716189

 

A sad day, but inevitable I suppose. Preserving this size of ship is enormously expensive and labour-intensive, not only at the beginning but across many years - just ask the folks who look after the big ships here in the US. Yes, it can be done, but it is very, very difficult. All very well bemoaning everyone in sight, but unless you have the money and time to invest.......

And yet, the US has quite a lot of big ships preserved including all four Iowa class battleships.

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8 minutes ago, VMA131Marine said:

And yet, the US has quite a lot of big ships preserved including all four Iowa class battleships.

The US does things differently to us.   Their carriers are expected to last 50 years or more and (arguably) get worked a lot harder whilst in service.  And yet didn't they sink one a few years back to create an artificial reef?

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24 minutes ago, VMA131Marine said:

And yet, the US has quite a lot of big ships preserved including all four Iowa class battleships.

 

 

I know - I've been on three of them, as well as a couple of the carriers. But ask anyone associated with them about upkeep and funding....

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22 minutes ago, Hepster said:

The US does things differently to us.   Their carriers are expected to last 50 years or more and (arguably) get worked a lot harder whilst in service.  And yet didn't they sink one a few years back to create an artificial reef?

Oriskany!  And the USS America (CV-66) was disposed of in a SINKEX. But several are preserved: Intrepid, USS Lexington (CV-16), USS Yorktown (CV-10), USS Hornet (CV-12), USS Midway (CV-41) and JFK (CV-67) is in long term storage in (Philadelphia) on donation hold for a museum

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20 minutes ago, Paul Bradley said:

 

 

I know - I've been on three of them, as well as a couple of the carriers. But ask anyone associated with them about upkeep and funding....

No doubt it's a challenge; look at the situation with the USS Olympia. I wonder if it would be better for the long term status of these ships if we encased the hulls in concrete as was done with the Mikasa (which, of course, was built in Britain).

Edited by VMA131Marine
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A further thought on the preservation of US carriers: it's a good thing that there are a number already preserved as museum ships as none of the CVNs will ever be saved because of the need to deconstruct part of each ship to de-nuclearize it.

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from those of us on this site who served on her - we can tell you that the man power hours required just to keep her clean, let alone keep the rust at bay etc, was significant. Whilst she (& Invincible) were always hugely popular on ship-open-to-visitors etc, as the sorry tale of HMS Plymouth reveals, there would never be enough interest and visitors to pay the bills over a calendar year. As junglierating states above, Belfast has a clever business model that "works", just, partly because of her unique location. Rusty Lusty was never gonna work out I suspect.

 

I've always wondered whether if HMS WARSPITE had been kept for the nation in the late 40's would she still be going as a tourist attraction or scraped as uneconomical???

 

 

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56 minutes ago, FIGHTS ON said:

I've always wondered whether if HMS WARSPITE had been kept for the nation in the late 40's would she still be going as a tourist attraction or scraped as uneconomical???

 

Part of the problem is the insistence on these things making a profit or at least breaking even. At some point, the decision should be about whether the ship, airplane, castle, whatever is a significant enough part of the national heritage that it is worth preserving. You can't put a price on some things. I would point out that in the US there is no fee to enter any of the museums of the Smithsonian. They are paid for through tax dollars and private donations. The National Museum of the US Air Force also has free admission. With few exceptions, I suspect most people agree this is worthwhile. Warspite should have been preserved. So should HMS KGV and HMS Rodney just because of their roles in the Bismarck pursuit.

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Umm we are skint as a country and I for one would rather the money spent on a rusty old gash barge be spent on something more worth while .....make the histerical dockyard cheaper.

The only reason why I went a couple of years ago was because an old Norwegian gf of mine happened to work for British waste of space in the dockyard and Got a huge discount!

alternatively.....NHS ,social services or a bag of screws for a Merlin 

 

Off soapbox 

Edited by junglierating
still ranting
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Ships are very expensive to maintain in any semblance of good order and there is the expense of mooring them up. The country is never going toi pay for it so they have to make money and they wont. HSM Plymouth, and the campaign to try and save HMS Edinburgh proved that.  Apart from HMS Belfast and the HMRY Britannia which have their own niches I doubt we will see anything else preserved in the water.

 

As for why they are being scrapped abroad a lot is down to environmental concerns and rules. It would be two expensive to do this in the UK, also where would they do it?

 

Julien

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There was also the so-called "US ghost fleet" of four ships that was scrapped at Hartlepool after a lengthy campaign to prevent it.  I suspect that Illustrious has a lower asbestos content than the American ships, not having their extensive steam-generating and plumbing plant.  intrepid, being smaller, presented less of a risk in this respect but, having visited an asbestos removal and disposal company for my former day job, proper removal and disposal of this material alone is a painstaking and necessarily expensive job and a UK-based company would have driven the price offered to the Misery of Disarmament for the ship lower than they could stomach as, after all, being a Government department they have to show a profit on their operations.  I strongly suspect that a less stringent attitude to potential environmental concers and lower labour rates in Turkey also helped the scrap merchant to offer MoD "the best price" (but was it value for the taxpayers' money?  I don't think I'll go there this morning.)

 

Ships, particularly warships, contain significant amounts of other hazardous materials which also need to be [seen to be] disposed of safely and there may have been other hazardous materials aboard that may have left intangible evidence (glow in the dark) of their presence, which would make scrapping in the UK a less-attractive prposition.

 

Many of us would probably bemoan the almost total destruction of the Tornado F. Mk. 3 fleet, even though it was hardly our greatest achievement as a fighter and the VC-10 and TriStar fleets, but someone paid MoD well for the privilege of turning them into saucepans.

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11 hours ago, VMA131Marine said:

Part of the problem is the insistence on these things making a profit or at least breaking even. At some point, the decision should be about whether the ship, airplane, castle, whatever is a significant enough part of the national heritage that it is worth preserving. You can't put a price on some things. I would point out that in the US there is no fee to enter any of the museums of the Smithsonian. They are paid for through tax dollars and private donations. The National Museum of the US Air Force also has free admission. With few exceptions, I suspect most people agree this is worthwhile. Warspite should have been preserved. So should HMS KGV and HMS Rodney just because of their roles in the Bismarck pursuit.

 

 

Most of our naval ships are "owned" by an nonprofit.  The three local battleships that where saved from the breakers where done via donations and support from there namesake states.  The Alabama, North Carolina, and Texas are all protected state parks now. All charge around $15 for admission and most have a museum that is included in the admission.  The Alabama has an excellent, if small, flight museum and submarine.  The Texas isn't far from the site of an battle for its independence.  And the North Carolina has a small display showing all the US Navy and the Confederate ships that bore her name.  However when we went the Carolina was the only one who offered guided tours. They use the ticket sales and hold fundraisers to maintain the ships.  What little bit I was involved in was ( I helped return and restore some old AL ANG planes to the flight museums in Mobile and Birmingham) a bureaucratic nightmare.  Nothing at all like the company run museums I was used to dealing with. 

Edited by Thud4444
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On 09/12/2016 at 4:30 AM, Julien said:

Ships are very expensive to maintain in any semblance of good order and there is the expense of mooring them up. The country is never going toi pay for it so they have to make money and they wont. HSM Plymouth, and the campaign to try and save HMS Edinburgh proved that.  Apart from HMS Belfast and the HMRY Britannia which have their own niches I doubt we will see anything else preserved in the water.

 

As for why they are being scrapped abroad a lot is down to environmental concerns and rules. It would be two expensive to do this in the UK, also where would they do it?

 

Julien

Good point but it would be nice to have saved one as a museum,the MOD flatly refused to sell it to be turned into one and two million's nothing when you consider the amount that vintage vehicles are bought for (Lancia/Ferrari/Aston) and when you think about the amount of money that enthusiasts/groups spend on keeping Steam trains alive and running....It's the UK's heritage/history that's being sold off and for what a couple a million...

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Just now, Julien said:

I think the issue is if they had sold it and you hade a situation like HMS Plymouth, would they then be expected to step in and help run it?

Probably but they don't give people the chance to try,if you try and fail at least you gave it a go,how many owners has Flying Scostman had,they gave it a go and she still survives....

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