India's first aircraft carrier slips into history

[WAR-rior]

And also Vikky Junior about to be completed. Hope Vikky Junior will excel Vikky Sr.

More than that its 1st indigenous. A future Industry for Ship building for the world. MAKE IN INDIA.

 

[Gessler]

Maintaining this thing costs a bomb - best is to scrap it. If I was a given a choice, I would preserve it, but now that the
Govt. has decided it best to scrap it, I'm not stopping them.

It maybe erased from existence but not from history. It's service to the Navy and the blows it dealt to the Pakistani military
can never be forgotten.

 

[anant_s]

More than that its 1st indigenous. A future Industry for Ship building for the world. MAKE IN INDIA.

INS Vikrant shall rise again

 

[Gessler]

And also Vikky Junior about to be completed. Hope Vikky Junior will excel Vikky Sr.

Excel the Sr. in what respect?

 

[thesolar65]

Excel the Sr. in what respect?

Performance, quality..I think!!

 

[Nova2]

It hurts to see her being broken down into pieces,with her an era comes to an end. ,no matter how old she was she looked so beautiful,RiP!

 

[Gessler]

Performance, quality..I think!!

IAC-1 exceeds the old Vikrant, the present Viraat and even the Vikramaditya in those terms. It's even a lot better than
the CV-16 Liaoning in that respect (modern design, gas turbine engines).

 

[Derolo]

Looks like the ship was a risk where ever it was berthed. Museum would have been tough as towing it out of this harbour would be quite risky.

Rather scrap it then letting it fall over and block the harbour for a few years

 

[thesolar65]

Here are some glimpses into INS Vikrant’s iconic past:

1) Vikrant was India's first aircraft carrier which wrote a glorious chapter in the history of the Indian navy in the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh and gave a new lease of life to the carrier concept which was under a cloud the world over.

2) The carrier, which was formally commissioned into the Indian navy in March 1961 at Belfast, Northern Ireland, by the then Indian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, formally joined the Indian fleet at Bombay on November 3, 1961, where it was received at Ballard Pier by independent India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and other high-ranking dignitaries.

3) Vikrant's finest hour came 10 years later when it played a pivotal role in the 1971 Bangladesh war in spite of a crack in its boiler and was considered such a prized catch by the Pakistanis that they sent their submarine Ghazi all the way to the Bay of Bengal to drop mines outside Visakhapatnam harbour and sink the aircraft carrier off the harbour.

4) Vikrant was one of the six Majestic class light fleet carriers which the Royal navy decided to build for itself midway through the Second World War. The war ended even before the first of these carriers could be completed.

5) Ironically, not a single one of these six ships served in the Royal navy. Two each were bought by the Canadian and the Australian navies. All these have long been decommissioned and scrapped. The fifth, the Hercules, was bought by the Indian navy and renamed the Vikrant. The sixth, named the Leviathan, has also been scrapped.

6) Though the carrier was first launched as Hercules in 1945, her construction work was suspended almost immediately. The ship was then kept in a state of preservation by the British admiralty until she was acquired by India in early 1957. The Vikrant was then moved to Belfast for her refit and modernisation, which was carried out at one of the reputed private shipyards. On completion of her refit, the ship was commissioned into the Indian navy in March 1961.

7) The Hercules, which was built by Vickers Armstrong, was purchased by India and underwent a four year refit at the Harland and Wolff Yard in Belfast, before being commissioned as Vikrant. At Harland and Wolff, the carrier was fitted with an angled flight deck and a steam catapult, both post-war inventions and armed with two squadrons of aircraft, the British Seahawk and the French Alize.

8) Captain Pritam Singh was the first commanding officer of the carrier. On May 18, 1961, the landing and arresting of the first jet aircraft on board took place. The honour of performing this feat went to Lieutenant (later Admiral) R H Tahiliani.

9) Till the Bangladesh war, the Vikrant had rarely fired a gun in anger. During the 1962 Indo-China conflict in 1962, there was talk of sending the Seahawks to the north to operate from airfields in Assam. A squadron was in fact developed for a few weeks.


10) During 1965, the Vikrant found itself under refit in the drydock, though the Pakistanis, in the heat of battle, claimed that they had sunk it. The carrier's aircraft were sent to Jamnagar and just as they were being primed for a night raid on Karachi, they were recalled for the defence of Bombay.

11) Such was the performance of the ship in the liberation of Bangladesh that it earned two Mahavir Chakras and 12 Vir Chakras.

12) Everyone loves a hero. The ship received a tumultuous welcome when she returned to Madras. The civil administration led by then chief minister M G Ramachandran, organised a special meal for the entire crew of 1,100, served on banana leaves, on the jetty.

13) Once, when the ship was berthed at Bandar Abbas, the shah of Iran flew the officers to Teheran for a special concert. In West Asia, where the only aircraft carrier people had seen were from the United States, they were surprised to see that an Asian navy could also fight a three-dimensional war.

14) The ship had one more achievement, when she received the navy's first Harrier VSTOL jump jet on board. The ship was given a ski jump in the naval dockyard for operation of the Harriers, which meant the end of carrier flying for the Alizes.

 

[Koovie]

That is True. We should have preserved it and converted it into the Museum or India should have gifted the Air Craft Career as token gift to Bangladesh as 'War Memorial of 1971' for preservation.

It has been a museum for years in Mumbai!

Unfortunately it could not generate enough money to maintain it And nobody from the private sector wanted to buy it either

 

[cranwerkhan]

How??

By rolling over laughing while clenching it's belly when Haji mastan try to perform a mujra.

hahaha there was perfect plan to do so but indian sailors were lucky plan was not executed bc group leader of that team had to move to Nepal in emergency

 

[cranwerkhan]

Haji Mastan? You mean Bombay gangster?

plan was foolproof but unfortunately could not executed on the day due to some reason

 

[cranwerkhan]

Enlighten us.

It would make a great fiction read.

Nops i will not give details .. but i will give you a hint .. ask someone or google for explosions in Gorakhpur airport in 1974.. under mountain tunnel full of aircraft and ammunition were destroyed instead.. if you could find someone from that airbase which was solely for airforce at that time he will tell you bc there was not much in the news papers and the event was kept out of media.

 

[Soumitra]

Nops i will not give details .. but i will give you a hint .. ask someone or google for explosions in Gorakhpur airport in 1974.. under mountain tunnel full of aircraft and ammunition were destroyed instead.. if you could find someone from that airbase which was solely for airforce at that time he will tell you bc there was not much in the news papers and the event was kept out of media.

Yeah a local gangster will try and sink an Aircraft Carrier . Halwa hai kyaa?

Next you will claim bablu supari has taken a supari to assassinate Obama and Modi on Republic Day

 

[Hareeshu IA MBT]

India's first aircraft carrier slips into history

View attachment 155374

Work has begun on scrapping the country's first aircraft carrier, Vikrant.

Built for the British Royal Navy as HMS Hercules in 1943, it was acquired by India in 1957 and saw action during the India-Pakistan war in 1971, playing a key role.

When the electric saws were pressed upon the ship, it essentially put an end to a movement by activists to save her. Vikrant was auctioned to a ship-breaker for Rs 63 crore this year. Mumbai's IB Commercials Pvt Ltd won the bid on January 29 and bought the vessel on April 9. Since then, the company faced hurdles as a PIL filed in the Bombay high court towards the end of 2013 proceeded to the Supreme Court.

Save Vikrant Committee chief Kiran Paigankar, who had filed the PIL to save the ship, termed it "a sad day in the country's glorious maritime history". He said it was unfortunate that the process to expedite the end of Vikrant was initiated by the Indian Navy which once considered the vessel its 'pride'.

View attachment 155377
Vikrant, a museum ship in her last role, scrapped after activists lose battle to save her.

"I was ready to accede to the activists' demand for converting the vessel into a permanent museum. But my request to get my money back, the money that I had pumped in to buy the ship, was not granted. I had taken loans on high interest," said Abdul Karim Jaka, the owner of IB Commercials. "I had been meeting the activists even before the PIL was filed. I met them even after the PIL was dismissed on August 14. I met Admiral (retd) I C Rao and Aam Aadmi Party's Meera Sanyal, but nothing concrete happened. The navy handed over the vessel to us in October. On November 12, we got the go ahead from the Supreme Court to start cutting the steel." His son Zuber said, "At 2pm on Tuesday , approximately 200 workers at our yard embarked upon the work to cut out 15,700 tons of steel from the vessel."
View attachment 155381
"An important chapter of Indian history revolving around Vikrant has finally ended. Despite all our efforts, we could not prevent her from breaking up," Paigankar said.

India's first aircraft carrier slips into history - The Times of India

Awww.... RIP