Costa Concordia dilemma: Salvage, cut or sink?
January 28, 2012
Costa Concordia: Is Father Massimo Donghi to blame?
by
Says Father Donghi to the Panorama website:
“What do you want me to say? I have nothing to add. Im OK although I’m still a bit in shock. I will talk to my parishioners in church. The judgment of others is not important to me.”Might it be that divine will caused the Costa Concordia to run aground? Add the theory to the growing list…
Costa Concordia dilemma: Salvage, cut or sink?
Twice the size of the Titanic and three times the length of a football pitch, the cruise ship Costa Concordia conjures up superlatives even as a wreck.
Fitted out with sumptuous spas, enormous ballrooms and a Formula 1 race car simulator for its 3,000 passengers, it cruised around the Mediterranean with the equivalent of a small town on board.
Now half-submerged off the coast of Tuscany like an office block that has keeled over, the Costa Concordia could cost the insurance industry up to US$1 billion (RM3.1 billion), making this the biggest-ever shipping loss for insurers.
An oil recovery sea platform (right) is seen next to the Costa Concordia, off the west coast of Italy, at Giglio island on January 25, 2012. — Reuters pic
And for the salvagers — maritime scavengers who are preparing to bid for the business of either making it shipshape again, or dismembering it for scrap, or even sending it to the bottom — the Costa Concordia poses one of the most daunting recovery tasks ever tackled.
At 290 metres long and 36 metres wide, the ship has a gross tonnage — describing the volume and size of the vessel — of 114,500 tonnes, and an estimated actual weight ranging from 25,000 to 45,000 tonnes.
But half-submerged and tipped on its side, it is now much heavier because it is full of water and furnishings, from soggy mattresses, carpets and clothes to waterlogged chairs and sofas. And it is perched perilously close to a sea cliff on rocks that in the worst-case scenario could crumble or collapse under the enormous weight.
All of which means that the owners of the crippled cruise ship will have to weigh up whether it makes more sense financially to refloat it or to chop it into pieces which can be sold for scrap, or simply sink it off the coast, given the technical difficulties involved.
“This has not happened with other passenger ships,” said Mike Lacey of the International Salvage Union, the sector’s trade association. “There have been large bulk carriers or large tankers that were stranded but not a type such as this one.”
Guesstimates for the cost of salvaging the ship are in the region of US$50 million or more. On top of that cost, if the exterior can be rescued, the ship’s owners will need to refit the Costa Concordia from scratch because its interiors are no longer usable.
HOUSE-SIZED FUEL TANKS
When a big ship runs into trouble, one of the first things the salvagers do is remove the fuel, so that it does not leak and cause an environmental disaster, before they can even start work on moving the vessel.
The Costa Concordia carries 2,300 tonnes of diesel oil, stored in 17 tanks, some of which are the size of a house.
The salvager typically cuts two or three holes in each tank, and makes a valve for each one, using a circular-shaped saw, said Hans van Rooij, a consultant at Dutch firm Global Marine Solutions, and a former director of SMIT Salvage.
One hole is used to remove the oil, another to let air or water in so that a vacuum does not form. A third hole can be used to pass in steam and warm up the oil: submerged in the cold water, the oil thickens and has to be heated so it can be pumped out easily.
SMIT is currently preparing to remove the cruise ship’s oil, a process which will take about a month.
With 30 or so years of experience in the industry, Van Rooij has worked on several disasters, including the lifting of the Herald of Free Enterprise, the British car ferry which capsized in 1987 near the Belgian coast, killing 193 people.
The ferry capsized because its doors had not been closed properly. It lay in a similar position to that of the Costa Concordia now, and was salvaged using piles to pull it upright.
SMIT — part of Dutch group Royal Boskalis Westminster, the world’s largest dredger — has a 170-year history of piloting, towing, and salvaging ships.
Thanks partly to its history as a maritime power in the 17th century and its strategic position on the coast, the Netherlands boasts some of the world’s leading companies in maritime services.
SMIT is one of the world’s leading salvage firms, while Dutch heavy lifting firm Mammoet also has salvage operations.
Together, SMIT and Mammoet successfully lifted the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk from the bottom of the Barents Sea, where it sank with 118 men in 2000 to a depth of 108 metres.
Both companies are expected to bid for the salvaging operation of the Costa Concordia.
THE BIG UNKNOWN
Even before the oil is pumped out, salvagers must have a clear idea of the underwater landscape. The big unknown in this case is whether the rocks where the Costa Concordia is precariously balanced are strong enough to take the additional burden or strain of equipment needed to right it.
Salvagers need to know whether the ship can be righted, and to do that, they need be able to set up pontoons or platforms, cables and gigantic anchors which are strong enough to support such a ship as it is pulled upright again.
“The weight is a problem. You need external forces, which could be as much as 10,000 tonnes. Then you have the problem of anchoring these forces,” Van Rooij said.
But salvagers say they do not know whether the rocks on this stretch of craggy coastline — the rocks which cost at least 16 lives when the ship turned to perform a salute to the island of Giglio and was brutally gored — are strong enough to support the ship as it is pulled off its side.
For example, salvagers typically need room to set two pontoons in place and to use both of those to slowly pull the ship upright.
To get a better understanding of the rocks, seismic experts and divers, as well as submarine equipment, may need to survey the rock bed where Costa Concordia is lying.
“You want to know the shape of the sea bed. What kind of soil is it - sand or rock? If you want to anchor something, you need to know how strong it is,” Van Rooij said.
Salvagers need to know where the ship is damaged, how stable it is in the position where it is lying, how it was built and what was on board.
FRILLS & THRILLS
Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,000 passengers and crew when it ran aground — and a lot more besides.
The ship was a 13-deck pleasure palace kitted out with vast restaurants, a three-storey high theatre, and an enormous spa.
“The Samsara Spa itself is one of the great draws of the Costa Concordia,” according to its publicity material.
“Asian-inspired and specialising in thalassotherapy — treatments that use seawater, marine mud, and other oceanic elements — it spans over 20,000 square feet. Tried-and-true therapies abound as well, from massages and facials to soaks and saunas.”
Elsewhere on board, passengers could jog along the top deck running track, splash around in the pools, play on the water slides and even indulge in the thrill of some fantasy motor racing thanks to a Formula 1 simulator.
Public spaces were named after European cities — Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and others — and brightly decorated, while each deck was named after a European country with the Netherlands at the bottom and Austria at the top.
The European Union served as the central motif for fashioning the Costa Concordia’s interior, the ship’s designer said.
“On this ship, the idea was for each public room to take a style that was evocative of every country in Europe, in the European Union,” veteran Miami architect Joe Farcus told Reuters in an interview.
As one guest commented on a travel website: “the cabins were beautiful, but the decorations of the boat elsewhere (some restaurants, deck 9) were a little bit too much plingpling.”
With all those fittings, bling-bling or otherwise, the ship is full of extra weight, making the task of salvaging trickier.
“There were more than 4,000 people on board, all carrying luggage and adding weight. If you want to salvage you need to take this into account,” Van Rooij said.
He estimated the ship’s weight at 45,000 tonnes, excluding luggage, food, and water.
“The accommodation will absorb a lot of water, which also adds weight. Every mattress soaks up water, the carpets do too.”
For divers searching the wreck for the last remaining bodies this is difficult work, with chairs and tables, curtains and deck loungers all bobbing around within the dark confines of the stricken ship.
“In the ship everything is floating — curtains, waste. The orientation is also different. Doors have fallen open, chairs are everywhere, it’s chaos and everything is dark,” Van Rooij said.
“A diver has a light on his helmet but he has to work very carefully and make sure there is a route back, that nothing falls and blocks the path.”
BIG BALLOONS?
Pier Luigi Foschi, the head of the ship’s owner Costa Cruises, said last week that removing the ship from its resting place would be “one of the most difficult things in the world.”
Salvaging is difficult because of its size — this is the biggest liner ever wrecked — and its position on a cliff under water. If the ship slides off, it could sink 60 metres.
One expert that Reuters spoke to said the ship could possibly be refloated using giant balloons.
“We’re here to look at how it can be raised,” a salvage expert from Titan Salvage told Reuters, speaking anonymously.
“It could definitely be done, with balloons, cables. There are various techniques.”
But others said that would be impossible because the vessel’s interior is divided into hundreds of cabins, so there would not be enough room to inflate several very large balloons.
“If you have big spaces in a ship you could do it. But this is a cruise ship with many compartments, halls and cabins. It doesn’t work,” Van Rooij said.
It would also be difficult to find an anchor point to lift the ship because the sea bed slopes to a depth of 60 metres on one side, he said.
“First, you have to see if the ship is strong enough to be pulled. Secondly, you have to anchor the equipment with which you will pull, for instance poles in a sea bed,” he said.
A cruise ship’s hull is strongly built but most of the decks are made of lightweight steel or aluminium.
“The Costa Concordia has been damaged and is lying slanted in such a way that will be very difficult to refloat. A container ship is much more strongly built, unlike a cruise ship, of which the top is less strong,” said Peter Tromp, manager at Dutch wreck removal company Euro Demolition.
It would also be difficult to prevent the ship from being dragged instead of turned when pulling it. The ship needs a pivotal point which is able to withstand strong force.
Van Rooij said that if one anchor can hold 200 to 300 tonnes, a 45,000-tonne ship would require at least 150 anchors for support, making it impractical to work around it.
CARVE-UP?
The alternative, and one that Euro Demolition thinks is the more likely option, is a carve-up.
Euro Demolition is currently cutting up the 109-metre cargo ship TK Bremen which ran aground off the northwestern Brittany coast last month in heavy storms.
“We work with big shears to cut it into pieces. It is also possible to saw the ship,” said Tromp of Euro Demolition.
To saw a ship into pieces, a big chain with sharp, hardened cutting edges is moved like a saw over the metal. But even this could prove difficult in the case of the Costa Concordia because the ship is close to the coast.
“Normally you saw between two floating pontoons but here there is only room for one because there is land on the other side,” Tromp said.
While the ship’s steel could be sold as scrap, all the interior fittings — the computers, chairs, carpets — are ruined and cannot be reused, so they will have to be removed and disposed of properly — and that will cost money.
“A container ship is made entirely of steel but a cruise ship is a giant amusement park with televisions and other things. It’s all in salt water and you have to throw it away. Dumping waste costs money,” Tromp said.
Van Rooij said removing the ship and its contents would cost dozens of millions of euros but he could not give an estimate.
The salvaging of the Tricolor, a ship which was carrying nearly 3,000 cars when it sank in the English Channel in December 2002, cost US$50 million, Van Rooij said, and was finished in the second half of 2004.
But clearing the Costa Concordia from the site could take up to two years, depending on whether it was refloated or cut up.
“The Tricolor took two seasons, including a winter. Here it will be milder but there is still a winter in the Mediterranean Sea. It can take up to two years,” Van Rooij said, because in the winter, bad weather or rough seas can hamper work.
If cutting the ship into pieces is too difficult, there is always a third, but very unlikely, option: dumping the ship on the bottom of the sea.
“I don’t think the Italian authorities will allow this,” said Lacey of the International Salvage Union.
For now, as it awaits it fate, the ship may turn out to be a tourist attraction. — Reuters
Varyag's Epic: from Russian castoff to China's first aircraft carrier
By Paul M. Barrett
An Admiral Kuznetsov-class warship, the vessel was to be 1,000 feet long, with a displacement of 65,000 tons. For a carrier of that vintage, the Varyag would be a middleweight, envisioned as the platform for several dozen short-takeoff, vertical-landing fighter jets, as well as 8 or 10 helicopters. By contrast, a U.S.S. Nimitz-class supercarrier has a load displacement of nearly 100,000 tons and room for at least 70 planes, many of them longer-range. The Varyag's keel was laid at the Mykolaiv Shipyard in southern Ukraine and, though not finished, it took to the water in 1988. Two years later the ship-in-the-making seemed to be on its way to joining Moscow's Black Sea fleet.
Then the USSR fell apart in 1991, and Ukraine inherited the still-unfinished Varyag. It was starting to resemble an aircraft carrier, the sort of vessel found at the core of any first-tier navy. The ship had a distinctive ski-jump incline at one end, meant to help launch aircraft. (American carriers have flat flight decks equipped with mechanized slingshots for the same purpose.) But the Varyag lacked critical elements, including electronics and engines. In 1992, as the former Soviet republics tentatively stumbled out of communism, construction of the ship ceased altogether. Ukraine couldn't afford to complete the vessel, according to a dispatch from the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. Still, TASS added, "the project has already cost the budget a pretty penny, and it would be absurd to scrap the ship." Engineless and rusting, the Varyag languished at anchor.
Warship? Never! The two-decade voyage of the Varyag—from Russian castoff to Macau pleasure palace to China's first aircraft carrier
In 1997 the National Agency of Ukraine for Reconstruction and Development followed the example of countless homeowners faced with too much old junk: It organized a garage sale. With the opening bid set at $20 million, competition for the powerless hulk was not exactly fierce. In November 1998 a well-connected Chinese entrepreneur named Cheng Zhen Shu said his company in Hong Kong, the Chong Lot Travel Agency, would pay the minimum $20 million for the privilege of towing the Varyag out of the Black Sea, through the Mediterranean, and all the way to the gambling haven of Macau, then controlled by Portugal. There, Cheng said, his company would refit the warship as a floating hotel and casino.
Devoted almost exclusively to coastal defense, the 500-vessel Chinese navy has long suffered a powerful case of aircraft carrier envy. During a meeting of the country's Central Military Commission on Jan. 21, 1958, Chairman Mao himself proposed the construction of "railways on the high seas"—oceangoing fleets of merchant ships escorted by carriers—according to a 2010 article in the Naval War College Review by Nan Li and Christopher Weuve, faculty members at the U.S. Naval War College. Mao's idea died for lack of funding, as did a plan in the 1970s to acquire a late-model carrier from Britain. In the 1980s, General Liu Huaqing, then the commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN, expressed his chagrin about the lack of a carrier. Liu, an intimate of Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, wore oversize aviator-style glasses and typically had a doleful look when photographed in his pea-green uniform. He had joined the Communist military in 1931 at the age of 14. "Without an aircraft carrier," he declared in 1987, according to the state news agency Xinhua, "I will die with my eyelids open"—meaning he would depart this life with a dear wish unfulfilled.
Liu retired from the military in 1997. When the Varyag was acquired a year later, it became his best hope for meeting his reward with his eyes closed.
The ex-Soviet ship was not the first used carrier China had purchased. In 1982 Beijing bought the smallish (15,000-ton) Majestic-class carrier Melbourne from Australia; it was dismantled for study and then scrapped. In 1998, the Russians sold China the much larger carrier Minsk, and, two years later, one called the Kiev. After undergoing similar scrutiny by Chinese ship designers, the Minsk and Kiev were turned into floating amusement parks.
Beijing's military planners do not have a made-in-China bias, observes Robert S. Wells, a former U.S. Navy commander who now advises the Pentagon as a private consultant based in northern Virginia. "They are eager to imitate foreign technology," he says, "and they don't have any concerns about intellectual property rights." In December 2006 the South China Morning Post reported that the Chinese military had completed a large-scale model of a Nimitz-class carrier, apparently for training purposes.
At the time, one hint that the Chong Lot Travel Agency might be part of a Chinese military reverse-engineering project was that Cheng, the head of the company, had spent 10 years as a People's Liberation Army officer. "We always had great suspicion," says Chong-Pin Lin, a Taiwanese national security scholar who has served as the island nation's Deputy Defense Minister. Since 1949, mainland China has claimed Taiwan as its own. The two countries coexist uneasily under a cloud of diplomatic ambiguity.
Still, Chong Lot's Cheng insisted he had only tourism in mind. According to the South China Morning Post, he denied that he was planning to hand the ship over to China's military. He told the Post in November 1998 that his company would spend $200 million to remake the Varyag into a water-borne resort "with 600 hotel rooms, a conference center and various attractions, including a nightclub and 'children's military playground.' "
As soon as word spread that a Chinese company with military ties had acquired the Varyag, Western intelligence agencies went on alert. Analysts were concerned "that China is trying to convert its navy, now mainly a coastal defense force, into a 'blue water' navy capable of projecting military power abroad," the Post reported. And this slowed the Varyag's departure from the Black Sea, as Western governments pressured Turkey to deny Cheng permission to pull his unequipped warship through the Bosphorus Strait. Chinese officials promised to pay the Turks for any damage caused by the transit through the heavily trafficked strait, according to the China-owned Hong Kong Commercial Daily.
The ex-PLA officer Cheng, for his part, complained that the delay would cost him the chance to compete for a casino license, the Commercial Daily noted. He said he hoped Macau, control of which had by then shifted to Beijing, would make a special allowance for him after his former Soviet ship was renovated.
In November 2001, Turkey finally let the Varyag pass, accompanied by an armada of tugboats. In the Mediterranean, the ship ran into trouble. Caught in a powerful autumn storm off Greece, it broke adrift. The Greek coast guard landed a helicopter on deck to help reattach the towlines. In the process, a sailor fell overboard and died. Eventually the warship was secured, and it continued on its journey. In 2002 the Varyag dropped anchor. It tied up not in Macau but in Dalian, a northern China port that is home to the country's largest shipyard.
It became increasingly unlikely that roulette and blackjack tables would ever grace the Varyag. Ian Storey and You Ji, a pair of scholars based in Australia, monitored what they called "persistent reports that the People's Republic of China intends to acquire an aircraft carrier force as part of its ambition to achieve 'blue water' (high seas) naval capability." They sifted thinly sourced Internet gossip, cryptic pronouncements from Chinese policymakers, and shipping industry intelligence. In a January 2004 article for the Naval War College Review, Storey and Ji conceded with characteristic academic caution that "no firm evidence exists that China really does intend to refurbish, build, or buy an aircraft carrier. Thus the prospect of a Chinese carrier remains subject to a great deal of rumor and speculation."
Taiwan, watching more skeptically, concluded otherwise. Not long after the boat docked in Dalian, workers began painting it a naval gray. "Then we saw the truth," says Taiwan's Professor Lin, the former defense official. "This was China's first aircraft carrier."
In 2006, China issued a much-discussed defense white paper announcing that the PLAN would extend its mandate beyond coastal defense to include "offshore defensive operations." Three years later, in 2009, when a Beijing-based reporter for Bloomberg News traveled to Dalian, he observed welding torches flaring at dusk on the flight deck of the still-unfinished aircraft carrier. The ship was in plain view in dry dock about 600 meters from an Ikea furniture store. The design of the ex-Soviet vessel is known as "short takeoff but arrested recovery," or STOBAR. Ships of this variety are generally simpler to build and maintain than the catapult-assisted carriers in the American fleet, which can get heavier aircraft aloft.
Inland from the Dalian port, the Chinese have built a 300-meter structure resembling their carrier, apparently for training sailors and officers. "Construction of the mock-up began last year, heralded by drummers and the provincial Communist Party leader," Bloomberg News recounted. "Two cranes towered above the structure … visible to farmers across Huangjia Lake fertilizing vegetable plots."
Far from wanting to surprise the rest of the world about the eventual inauguration of its first carrier, the Chinese did everything possible to advertise their plans—apparently seeking to avoid rattling Asian neighbors and the U.S.
In April 2011, Xinhua heralded the slope-decked vessel's imminent debut, posting photographs on an official website. "Huge warship on the verge of setting out," the state news agency declared, "fulfilling China's 70-year aircraft carrier dreams." Beijing rechristened the ship the Shi Lang, after a 17th century Chinese admiral who served the Ming and Qing dynasties. The symbolism could not have been lost on historically minded government officials in Taipei. In 1683, Admiral Shi led a force of 300 ships in the amphibious conquest of Taiwan.
Six months ago, in August, the Shi Lang took a modest maiden voyage under the Chinese flag. After nearly a decade of additional tinkering by Chinese engineers, it still lacks missiles, jets, and pilots, but it can cruise under its own power.
From Taipei to Tokyo to Seoul to Washington, diplomats and military analysts are scrutinizing every move the Shi Lang makes, searching for signs of China's larger intentions. "It's surprising to a lot of people that China has been the one member of the United Nations Security Council not to have an aircraft carrier," says Wells, the former U.S. Navy commander who also served as a White House national security adviser during the George W. Bush Administration. Among those in the carrier club are Russia, France, and Brazil. The U.S. alone has 11 carriers. Launching their own aircraft carrier, says Wells, "signals that [the Chinese] expect to be respected as a great power."
The Shi Lang is only one element of a much broader overhaul of China's military. The program includes construction of dozens of new Song-class submarines armed with cruise missiles and the development of a land-based antiship ballistic missile known as the DF-21D, specifically designed to destroy aircraft carriers and other warships. In response, the U.S. has communicated loudly that it does not intend to allow China to bully American allies in the region. The Pentagon is scheduled to take delivery in 2015 of the first of a new breed of nuclear-powered aircraft carrier equipped with pilotless drones. During an Asian tour last November, President Barack Obama announced a renewed American focus on the Pacific, illustrated by the transfer of thousands of U.S. Marines to bases in Australia.
American shows of strength are in part a reaction to China's challenges to Vietnamese and Philippine claims to oil and gas reserves beneath the South China Sea. Trade across that body of water has an annual value of $5.3 trillion, $1.2 trillion of it involving the U.S., according to the Pentagon. Since 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao has spoken publicly of a more expansive naval policy that would help secure international shipping lanes, ensure access to energy sources, and protect Chinese nationals living overseas.
The Taiwanese, who refer to their country as the Republic of China, fear that Beijing harbors plans to emulate the invasion-inclined Admiral Shi Lang. Taiwan has 23 million citizens, compared with China's 1.3 billion. According to the Pentagon, China has as many as 1,200 short-range ballistic missiles deployed opposite Taiwan. Shunned by most of the world, Taiwan does not have an official representative at the UN and isn't permitted to maintain a formal embassy in Washington. Under a 1979 U.S. law, however, the U.S. has an obligation to ensure Taiwan's self-defense by supplying the nation with weapons. As recently as last September, American officials approved upgrading the island's fleet of Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters.
"In what represents a major threat to the Republic of China," Deputy Minister of National Defense Andrew Yang asserts in an e-mail interview, "the mainland has shifted from traditional modes of strategic thinking, which concentrated on crossing the sea to do battle on land, to looking to encircle Taiwan by adroitly deploying forces off Taiwan's east coast." In theory, a Chinese carrier-led naval task force could be used to deny the U.S. the ability to come to Taiwan's rescue.
Beijing insists that it has no hostile intentions. When Chinese officials met with Obama during an international summit in Indonesia in November, the Beijing delegation said their country is prepared to negotiate a binding code of conduct for all nations whose vessels ply the South China Sea, Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin told reporters. China merely aims to protect international shipping, Liu added. Beijing, he said, sees the U.S. as "an important player in Asia ever since the Second World War."
Ten days later, on Nov. 29, the Shi Lang went for her second test cruise.
Despite the tension, economic relations between Taiwan and China have improved in recent years under the leadership of Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, who was reelected in mid-January. Taiwan has relaxed trade, travel, and investment restrictions, and has ended a six-decade ban on visitors from the mainland. In 2010 the countries signed a trade accord, cutting tariffs and increasing access to cross-border banking.
Noting these positive diplomatic developments, Chien-Min Chao, Taiwan's Deputy Minister of Mainland Affairs, nevertheless emphasizes in an e-mail interview that "the continued military buildup in mainland China threatens not only peace in the Taiwan Strait but also regional security."
Last April, Admiral Robert Willard, the top U.S. military commander in the Asia-Pacific region, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that he didn't consider the Chinese carrier an imminent menace. He acknowledged, though, that its presence troubled American allies. "Based on the feedback we received from our partners and allies in the Pacific," he testified, "I think the change in perception by the region will be significant." In addition to its commitment to Taiwan, the U.S. has defense treaties with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. Willard, whose command is based in Hawaii, assured the senators that the Chinese would have to go through "a long period of training and development and eventual exercising preceding any operational [carrier] capability." Landing jets on the deck of a rolling ship is among the most difficult of all military maneuvers. In 2009, Brazil announced it would provide naval aviation training to the PLAN, according to a Pentagon white paper published last year.
Optimists in the West see expanding Chinese naval activity as an opportunity for greater cooperation. Since 2008, the PLAN has helped support multinational humanitarian and antipiracy missions off the east coast of Africa. The U.S. has encouraged Beijing's participation, and last summer, China deployed its ninth escort formation in that region. Chinese military leaders have even broached the once-taboo topic of building supply-and-repair bases overseas to support the antipiracy missions.
"The Chinese are proud of having had their warships escort the merchant vessels of other nations, and that's a good thing," says Wells, the former U.S. naval commander. As a Pentagon consultant, he participated last year in a military conference in Bahrain where Chinese naval officers made a presentation about their activities in the Somali Basin and the Gulf of Aden. The Chinese, Wells says, openly lobbied for expanded antipirate responsibilities.
The U.S. State Dept. declined to comment on the record for this article. But government officials familiar with American diplomacy in the Pacific say the cooperative military-to-military interaction has helped improve overall relations between China and the U.S.
General Liu lived to see his navy take part in these joint operations far from home—something unimaginable earlier in his career. He may also have known about the initiation of another of his goals: the creation of an aircraft carrier designed and fabricated in China.
The Pentagon, in its 2011 Annual Report to Congress on Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China, speculated that the building of Beijing's first indigenous carrier may have begun last year. "If China commence[d] construction in 2011," the report said, "the PLA Navy could have its first indigenous carrier achieving operational capacity as early as 2015."
The Chinese have built enormous container ships, supertankers, and liquefied-natural-gas carriers. That experience would be helpful in constructing the hulls of more complex aircraft carriers, Li and Weuve write. China is also developing a carrier-capable fighter, called the J-15, or Flying Shark, which is based on a Russian Su-33 warplane obtained from Ukraine in 2004, according to the Pentagon.
For all of these advances, however, General Liu did not witness the first voyage of the Shi Lang under a Chinese flag. He died last January, his eyelids presumably open, at the age of 94.
Close Up Photos of China’s Carrier
These are very, very close-up pictures of China’s aircraft carrier, the ex-Soviet Varyag.
While we’ve written about the new weapon systems the Chinese are installing aboard her, notice these pics show some early 1960s-vintage RBU-6000 Soviet-designed anti-submarine rocket launchers. Nothing like some 50-year-old weaponry to outfit your “new” carrier. Although, another picture shows a more modern rolling airframe missile launcher.
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