Kochi (Kerala): India launched its second Aircraft Carrier today, which will give a major boost to the country’s Navy which has a huge maritime tract to guard and monitor against adversarial neighbours like China and Pakistan.
INS Vikrant, the first indigenously-designed-and-built aircraft carrier, can host at a time around 30 fighter planes – Russian-made latest jets MiG-29K, the naval version of MiG-29.
It will also house several military helicopters, besides being equipped with the surface-to-air Barak missiles.
The ship, which is of the size of 2 football fields end-to-end, has been built at a cost of Rs 20,000 crore.
The country already has one Aircraft Carrier, INS Vikramaditya, which is a refurbished Russian warship whose original name was Admiral Gorshkov.
INS Vikrant is a reincarnated version of an Aircraft Carrier by the same name, which was built by the Britishers and decommissioned in 1997 after serving the Indian Navy for around 36 years and playing a key role in India’s victory over Pakistan in the 1971 War.
Commissioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Cochin Shipyard here, INS Vikrant is expected to take 5-6 months to be combat ready, according to Defence officials.
The Aircraft Carrier has a flying deck which is 262 metres long and 62.4 meters wide.
It has 2,200 compartments and can lodge a crew of around 1,600, including women officers and sailors for whom there are specialised cabins.
The MiG-29K fighters provide “enough punch to undertake air dominance and power projection missions simultaneously, bestowing the Commander at sea, great flexibility,” according to the Indian Navy.
The new Aircraft Carrier is much advanced and better than its illustrious predecessor with the same name.
INS Vikrant or Vikrant R11, which was decommissioned in 1997, was India’s first Aircraft Carrier.
It was actually built for the British Royal Navy in 1943, with the original name being Her Majesty’s Ship (HMS) Hercules and commissioned in the British Royal Navy in 1945.
In 1957, the Britishers sold it to India in a dysfunctional condition. It had to be refurbished at Harland and Wolf Yard in Ireland, which took around 4 years.
The refitted ship was formally commissioned in the Indian Navy in November 1961 by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
During the 1971 war with Pakistan for liberation of Bangladesh, the Aircraft Carrier played a key role as many of the battles were fought in the Bay of Bengal.
After being decommissioned in 1997, it lay anchored off Mumbai Harbour in the form of a museum.
Finally, in 2013, the government decided to scrap it, arguing that its maintenance was too expensive. The scrapping was done in 2014.
In terms of comparisons, the new version of INS Vikrant is much bigger than its predecessor, which was about 192 meters long.
While the earlier ship could move at the maximum speed of 46 km per hour, the new ship can cruise at 56 km per hour.
