Vanguard Magazine

28 APRIL/MAY 2025 www.vanguardcanada.com R A P I D LY E V O LV I N G T E C H We keep our hard structure in class with Lloyd's over 24 years. We have to take five thickness measurements per plate on a thin hold wall ship that's 30 years old. That means you're not getting out of dock too quickly. But we mustn't cast all of our opportunity for future dockings in that light. The British Type 45 destroyers are built to Lloyd's naval ship rules. There's a lot more steel in the structure of the ships. They are a lot more resilient, and we find that we can get those through dry dock for recertification much more quickly. If you can cast your imagination forward to the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers built to Lloyd's naval ship rules, we keep them in something called continuous carrier availability, with the view that we want to keep the ships available and manage those updates and upgrades at the right time in the ship's operational program, not as a force majeure for the Navy when the ships are in dry dock. And that's where we've gone to with the carriers. We got HMS Queen Elizabeth through her first certification docking in Scotland in six weeks. And if we charac- terize that in the costs related to keeping a ship in dry dock, it's about 120,000 pounds (sterling) a week before I've lit a welding torch. If I bring you a change and it's another 10 weeks, that's over 1 million pounds of time-rated costs. So, I'm really motivated to get ships through the dry dock phase. In the UK continuous availability is a theme that we've adopted now with Type 45 destroyers, which we call a total avail- ability program. The ships go through a three annual docking cycles, and we've started to introduce remote hull survey monitoring techniques. Managing a con- tinuation survey regime is actually easier on larger ships, as their size provides more op- portunity to cycle through tanks and access structural areas. Ironically, this can be more straightforward than on smaller combatants like destroyers, which are in high operation- al demand and offer less flexibility for such work. And getting the time in the program to get into the tanks is tough. For the air- craft carriers, they're in continuation survey now. So, when we go and write the dock- ing contract, we've opened up the docking certificate because it's in continuation sur- vey for the previous six years. We are do- ing about a fifth of the tanks, and we know that the structure of the hull is going to be okay, so we can get through the underwa- ter work really, really quickly. That's a big shift for us. We haven't done any capability update or upgrade in those aircraft carriers, noting that we've now carried out hundreds of changes. We haven't done any of those in dry dock. They've all been done concur- rently as free time fits in an availability cycle, or where we've had a capability insertion period scheduled for the ship where there's a bigger change to do. RICHARD GRAVEL: Q: I would ask you as well to just com- ment on is the RN accepting more risk? And if so, how are you mitigating those types of risks? RAdm STEVE McCARTHY: In the generation of complex warships that we are building and that we operate today, we've seen the level of network integra- tion rise, not as Moore's Law might have predicted it, but certainly rise to very, very highly sophisticated level. For the Royal Navy, I share unifying objectives my three

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