Through the eye of a needle, navy's largest ship sets sail for the first time

A police boat on the Firth of Forth as HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of two new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, begins to leave the Rosyth dockyard near Edinburgh to begin her sea worthiness trials

The “needle” was the Rosyth basin, part of the naval dockyard on Scotland’s Firth of Forth, where the enormous aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, had been put together.

Weighing 65,000 tonnes and having cost £3bn, she will be the nation’s flagship for the next two generations.

Yesterday, she left port for the first time, ready to undertake her maiden sea trials over the summer. But although the almost square basin, at 560 yards the length of five football pitches, is the biggest of its kind in the UK and capable of accommodating 11 battleships, its gate is barely wide enough for one.

On the stroke of high tide, the ship was inched through it, avoiding the dock walls by a matter of inches. Beneath the water line, less than 20 inches separated the bottom of the ship from the sea bed.

The manoeuvre took three hours. A few hundred metres into the Forth, the carrier dropped anchor until the tide had lowered, allowing space to pass under the road and rial bridges.

The commanding officer, Capt Jerry Kyd, observed: “We have to be very careful, but you practise it and drill it and rehearse it to make sure we could do it safely in a timely fashion because the tide waits for no man.”

Ten thousand people worked on the construction of the ship, which had been made up in sections at yards around the UK and transported to Rosyth to be assembled. Its crew will be 700 strong but can nevertheless be fed in 90 minutes when at action stations, from the 45 days’ supply of provisions kept on board.

“This is the moment where that British shipbuilding expertise meets the professionalism of the Royal Navy to give us a ship to be proud of,” said Rear Admiral Keith Blount, head of the Navy’s carrier programme.

Capt Kyd added: “She’s done her test drive and after that we will go down to Portsmouth, the ship’s home, and get her finally ready to join the Royal Navy fleet, hopefully at the end of the year.”

There have been questions as to whether a vessel so gargantuan and costly can be justified in an age in which battles are waged in the sky or by computer.

But Capt Kyd insisted that HMS Queen Elizabeth was an “incredibly flexible tool” that was not only about war fighting, but also deterrence, political signalling, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance.

The second ship in the class, HMS Prince of Wales, has cost a further £3bn and is currently being fitted out in the Rosyth dock.