page_title: Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier
section_title: General characteristics
hierarchical_section_title: Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier / Design / General characteristics
caption_attribution_description: English: The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) (left), steams alongside the (smaller) British Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious (R 06) in the Persian Gulf on April 9, 1998. The two ships are operating in the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Southern Watch, which is the U.S. and coalition enforcement of the no-fly-zone over Southern Iraq.
context_page_description: The Queen Elizabeth class is a class of two aircraft carriers of the United Kingdom's Royal Navy. The lead ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, was named on 4 July 2014, in honour of Elizabeth I. She was commissioned on 7 December 2017, with an initial operating capability expected in 2018. The second, HMS Prince of Wales, was launched on 21 December 2017, and was commissioned on 10 December 2019. At the NATO 2014 Wales summit, then Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the second carrier would be brought into service, ending years of uncertainty surrounding its future. This was confirmed by the November 2015 Government Strategic Defence Review, with both carriers entering service, one being available at any time.
  The contract for the vessels was announced on 25 July 2007, by the Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne, ending several years of delay over cost issues and British naval shipbuilding restructuring. The contracts were signed one year later on 3 July 2008, with the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, a partnership formed with Babcock International, Thales Group, A&P Group, Rosyth Dockyard, the UK Ministry of Defence and BAE Systems.
context_section_description: The ships' company is 679, rising to 1,600 when the air crew is added. In April 2015 a parliamentary reply stated that the average crew size would be 672. The ships have a displacement of 65,000 tonnes on delivery, but the design allows for this to reach over 70,000 tonnes as the ships are upgraded through their lifetime. They have an overall length of 280 metres (920 ft), a width at deck level of 70 metres (230 ft), a height of 56 metres (184 ft), a draught of 11 metres (36 ft), and a range of 10,000 nautical miles (12,000 mi; 19,000 km). The Ministry of Defence decided not to use nuclear propulsion due to its high cost, so Integrated Electric Propulsion was chosen whereby power is supplied by two Rolls-Royce Marine Trent MT30 36 MW (48,000 hp) gas turbine generator units and four Wärtsilä diesel generator sets (two 9 MW or 12,000 hp and two 11 MW or 15,000 hp). The Trents and diesels are the largest ever supplied to the Royal Navy, and together they feed the low-voltage electrical systems as well as four GE Power Conversion's 20 MW Advanced Induction Motor (arranged in tandem) electric propulsion motors that drive the twin fixed-pitch propellers.
  Instead of a single island superstructure containing both the ships' navigation bridges and flying control (flyco) centres, the ships have these operations divided between two structures, with the forward island for navigation and the aft island for controlling flying operations. The primary reason for having twin islands was to space out the funnels, as the ships were designed with redundancy with "duplicated main and secondary machinery in two complexes with independent uptakes and downtakes in each of the two islands", while the alternative of consolidating all the exhaust trunkings would have reduced hangar space as well as increasing the vulnerability to flooding. There are also additional benefits to having separate islands rather than a single large island, such as easier construction, reduced wind turbulence, and freed up deck space. Using two structures provides separate mountings for the air surveillance radar (forward), which does not interfere with the medium range radar (aft); furthermore, visibility is improved for both navigation and landing operations.
  Under the flight deck are a further nine decks. The hangar deck measures 155 by 33.5 metres (509 by 110 ft) with a height of 6.7 to 10 metres (22 to 33 ft), large enough to accommodate up to twenty fixed and rotary wing aircraft. To transfer aircraft from the hangar to the flight deck, the ships have two large lifts, each of which is capable of lifting two F-35-sized aircraft, or one C47 Chinook from the hangar to the flight deck in sixty seconds. The ships' only announced self-defence weapons are currently the Phalanx CIWS for airborne threats, with miniguns and 30 mm cannon to counter seaborne threats.
caption: The Queen Elizabeth-class carriers are closer in size to a Nimitz-class carrier (left) than the Invincible-class ships they replace (right)
exif: {}