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After nearly six decades in service, India’s majestic aircraft carrier INS Viraat will set sail for the last time from Mumbai to Kochi this week, powered by its own boilers before it is decommissioned. Once the ship berths itself with the Southern Naval Command on July 27 after sailing out from Mumbai on July 23, all valuable equipment on board like engines, radars, guns will be dismantled to prepare it for the decommissioning. The ship will then be towed back to Mumbai where it will be decommissioned. However, it is still not clear what will happen to the ship, which...

INS Viraat on its 50th anniversary in 2009. Indian Navy Photo The oldest active aircraft carrier in the world will be converted into a docked museum when the ship, now in the Indian Navy, decommissions next year. INS Viraat (R-22) was commissioned in 1959 into the Royal Navy as HMS Hermes (R-12), the last of the Centaur-class conventional aircraft carriers. It was transferred to India in 1987 after undergoing refits and equipment upgrades, according to The Tribune in India. After 57 years of service life, the ship will decommission in 2016. The Tribune reported that Andhra Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation...

India's sole current aircraft carrier, the 29,000 ton INS Viraat, is running out of Harrier aircraft. Two years ago, Viraat emerged from 18 months in a shipyard getting maintenance and upgrades. With its engine and hull refurbished, and its electronics upgraded, India has announced that Viraat will serve for another decade. But back in 2009, one Harrier had just crashed, and now only ten of the original 30 Harriers are operational. Since Britain recently retired the last of its Harriers, there's always the possibility of India getting some of those before they are scrapped

Boeing India has offered a naval variant of the F/A 18 E/F Super Hornets multi role fighter jet platform to the Indian Navy. The Navy currently has one aircraft carrier (INS Viraat) in service and Russia is expected to deliver INS Vikramaditya by 2012. India is developing indigenous aircraft carriers and the aim is to have a total of three Aircraft carriers resulting in two fully operational Carrier battle groups and an additional Aircraft carrier eventually in refit making India an operating Blue-water navy.

The Indian and US navies have set up a Valentine’s Day tryst with aircraft carriers. The USS Ronald Reagan, named after a predecessor of US President George W. Bush who is scheduled to visit in early March, will be teaming up with the INS Viraat off the coast of Sri Lanka on February 14. The USS Ronald Reagan is steaming in from Singapore at the head of a carrier strike group that is forward deployed in the US’s “global war on terrorism”. The rendezvous for the passage exercise — or Pas Ex — was set up in quicktime because the...