Solomon2
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Vlad's aircraft carrier
November 6, 2018
By J.R. Dunn
We have a new candidate for world’s unluckiest ship – Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov.
There’s an old urban legend concerning a ship called the HMS Friday. The story claims that, during the 19th century, the Royal Navy, in an effort to combat a widespread maritime superstition about anything having to do with Fridays, ordered a ship on Friday, saw that the keel was laid on Friday, launched it on Friday, commissioned it on Friday, and sent the crew on its first voyage on a Friday. The ship is supposed to have disappeared with all hands. Well, the Friday never actually existed. But anyone who misses it can take heart.
The Kuznetsov, named after the Soviet-era admiral of the fleet, is an aircraft carrier, I guess you’d call it (the Russians classify it as a heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruiser). As opposed to American aircraft carriers, which are capital ships comprising the mainspring of naval operations, the Kuznetsov is a support vessel intended to act alongside other fleet elements. The ship has barely half the displacement of aNimitz or Ford class carrier (55,000 tons as against 100,000+ tons), and fields only a third of the aircraft (24 to 75+).
A major drawback involves that fact that Kuznetsov lacks the catapults fitted to American carriers, instead utilizing a ski-jump flight deck, which means that it cannot operate at the near-frenetic pace maintained on U.S. ships and is limited as to the aircraft it can field. Planes flying off the Kuznetsov are also limited to much smaller payloads when compared to U.S. Navy jets.
The ship has had a hard-luck history. Though the official date for start of construction was in September 1982 (typically for the USSR at the time, it didn’t actually start until well into 1983), and launched in 1985, the ship didn’t become operational for another ten years thanks to the turmoil surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. By 1997, after a short operational cruise, she was laid up for major repairs which weren’t completed for over a year. Two more years passed before she once again went to sea. In 2005, an Su-33 slipped off the deck and fell into the Atlantic. Two years later, the carrier triggered an international incident by launching aircraft within the flight paths of helicopters servicing the Norwegian oil platforms in the North Sea.
In January 2009, a fire broke out, killing one sailor. A month later a refueling accident resulted in a large oil spill off Ireland.
In 2016 the ship embarked on the latest of several missions in support of Russian interests in Syria, passing through the English Channel on its way to the Mediterranean. It was accompanied by a naval tug in case of breakdown, possibly a first in the annals of naval aviation. Onlookers marveled at the amount of black smoke the ship was producing – a sure sign of malfunctioning engines.
In November, one of the ship’s MiG-29Ks crashed into the sea after running out of fuel while waiting for an arrester cable to be repaired. The pilot ejected and was rescued. Only two weeks later, an Su-33 involved in bombing operations overran the flight deck and plunged into he sea while attempting to land. Once again, the pilot was rescued. It developed that the arresting gear had again failed after the plane hooked the cable. In response, the Kuznetsov’s aircraft were flown to shore bases, while the ship sat out in the Mediterranean, mute and useless.
Just last week, the Kuznetsov capped this sad history while undergoing modernization at Murmansk. The PD-50 drydock holding the ship sank without warning, sending a seventy-ton crane smashing into the flight deck and leaving a huge five-meter gash. One dockworker was killed and a number of others were wounded. The Kuznetsov floated free and was steered away from the disaster site by a tug. It now sits in harbor, waiting for somebody to figure out what to do with it with the only drydock in the area capable of handling lying on the bottom.
What to make of the Kuznetsov saga? First that Russia, not the world’s most notable maritime nation, has no business trying to operate a ship of this class without developing acceptable training and doctrine. The officers and crews are far from wholly to blame, being forced to take on tasks that were well over their heads without proper preparation and support. Secondly, it’s clear that the sloppiness, incompetence, and plain don’t-care attitude that afflicted the USSR remains virulent in Russia. The story of the Kuznetsov is one of small, avoidable errors piling up on atop of another until disaster was unavoidable. Clearly, if the Kuznetsov ever again takes to the high seas, we’ll simply see more of it.
The good news out of all this is that the Kuznetsov was not the only vessel of its class. A second ship, the Varyag, lay derelict and half-completed in Ukraine for years after the collapse of the USSR. It was finally sold to China, where it was completed and commissioned as the Liaoning, China’s first carrier, which now acts as one of the centerpieces of China’s attempt to defy the U.S. Navy.
Good luck with that, boys.
