Aircraft Games Movies
Published 1 Jul 2010In the Western Approaches, Ark Royal welcomes her air group back aboard, with the occasional hairy approach for newly qualified aviators.
This appears to be footage from episode 3 of Sailor, a BBC television series from 1976 about life aboard HMS Ark Royal.
The Wikipedia entry for HMS Ark Royal (R09) begins:
HMS Ark Royal (R09) was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy and, when she was decommissioned in 1979, was the Royal Navy’s last remaining conventional catapult and arrested-landing aircraft carrier. She was the first aircraft carrier to be equipped with angled flight deck at its commissioning; her sister ship, HMS Eagle, was the Royal Navy’s first angle-decked aircraft carrier after modification in 1954. Ark Royal was the only non-United States vessel to operate the McDonnell Douglas Phantom at sea.
[…]
While Ark Royal‘s career spanned 24 years from the time of her commissioning (her name was a household word), she spent as much time in refit; repair and reserve and modernisation as in commissioned service (12 years). It required a lot of effort from her engineers to keep her serviceable between yard periods. Ark Royal had been poorly preserved during its lengthy construction from 1942 to 1955, and much of its machinery was obsolete by its completion, including its dated DC electrics, supplemented later by some AC systems, resulting in a ship which experienced regular defects and mechanical failure. Eagle was a more reliable and well-built ship, and spent far more time at sea than her sister. The scrapping of Ark Royal in 1980, two years after Eagle, marked the end of conventional fixed-wing aircraft operations aboard Royal Navy carriers. She had borne so many innovations, yet her replacement was not equipped with any of these. There was some discussion about preserving her as a museum ship, and some private funds were raised; the MOD would not sanction these efforts.
