HMS Illustrious Royal Navy aircraft carrier
A Harrier GR7 of 1 Sqn RAF approaches the flight deck of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. Armourers are preparing to bomb up two other Harrier's. HMS Illustrious was a light aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy and the second of three Invincible-class ships constructed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was the fifth warship and second aircraft carrier to bear the name Illustrious, and was affectionately known to her crew as "Lusty". In 1982, the conflict in the Falklands necessitated that Illustrious be completed and rushed south to join her sister ship HMS Invincible and the veteran carrier HMS Hermes. To this end, she was brought forward by three months for completion at Swan Hunter Shipyard, then commissioned on 20 June 1982 at sea en route to Portsmouth Dockyard to take on board extra stores and crew. She arrived in the Falklands to relieve Invincible on 28 August 1982 in a steam past. Returning to the United Kingdom, she was not formally commissioned into the fleet until 20 March 1983. After her South Atlantic deployment, she was deployed on Operation Southern Watch in Iraq, then Operation Deny Flight in Bosnia during the 1990s and Operation Palliser in Sierra Leone in 2000. An extensive re-fit during 2002 prevented her from involvement in the 2003 Iraq War, but she was repaired in time to assist British citizens trapped by the 2006 Lebanon War. Following the retirement of her fixed-wing British Aerospace Harrier aircraft in 2010, Illustrious operated as one of two Royal Navy helicopter carriers. After 32 years' service, the oldest ship in the Royal Navy's active fleet was formally decommissioned on 28 August 2014 even though she would not be replaced until HMS Queen Elizabeth's commissioning in 2017. Despite the UK Ministry of Defence's announcement in 2012 that, once decommissioned, Illustrious would be preserved for the nation, in 2016 she was sold and towed to Turkish company Leyal for scrapping.
Size: 5607px × 3650px
Photo credit: © Troy GB images / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 1, air, aircraft, armed, aviation, bae, bomb, bomber, bombs, british, carrier, class, crew, cvs, deck, defence, defense, fighter, flight, force, forces, gr7, ground, harrier, hms, illustrious, invincible, jet, jump, landing, military, naval, navy, operations, r05, raf, rn, royal, squadron, stol, uk, vstol, warfare, warship, weapon, weapons
