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NAVY NEWS, DECEMBER 2009 23
The year
of living
e: capt shaun jones, rfa wave ruler
pictur
Daringly
SHE weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower.
She’s the length of 16 double-decker buses.
She can track aircraft over Paris or Manchester from the safety of the Solent.
She can shoot down a cricket ball travelling at Mach 3 (if, of course, a cricket ball could travel at three
times the speed of sound…).
She generates 46 megawatts of electricity.
She’s two and a half times the size of her predecessors.
Now we could fi ll a couple of pages with ‘gee whizz’ facts about HMS Daring, blinding you with
statistics.
But oddly it’s the little things which stand out on Britain’s newest warship: the attention to detail, the
lack of clutter, the change in mindset – things that the ordinary public wouldn’t think twice about.
The media may call her the iPod ship (yes, it’s cobblers), or the world’s most advanced warship
(no, that’s probably not cobblers), but it’s the easy-to-open bulkhead doors (no faffi ng around with
umpteen clips), it’s that wider bunk (an extra six inches in bed makes all the difference…), it’s that
third extra locker space, it’s those few extra plug sockets for all your electriconic gizmos, it’s the
end to communal showers/heads, it’s the fact that no longer will you wake up in the middle of the
night and whack your head on the sewage pipe or computer cabling running through your pit,
that’s what makes Daring different. It’s a seismic shift in the way the RN thinks – and works.
“The perception in the rest of the RN is that we’re ‘new Navy’. This is the start of the future,”
says Lt ‘Dick’ Whittington, deputy weapons engineer offi cer.
Lt Whittington is ‘old Navy’. He joined the RN three decades ago. His fi rst ships stopped fl ying
the White Ensign long before many of his shipmates were born.
marina Continued on page 24
March
April
January
February
FO
ST
ca
m
e
o
a
v
b
ersee saf
oa
rd
to

A sp
ot of
Hello mum! Arri
ved in Pomp
ey for the Y
et
ipp
y tr
ee. W
aining. tr
aining w
eather
first time. W
eather was gr
otty.
Our first meeting with HMS Ark
Roy
al. W
eather still gr
ott
y. gr
ot
t
, y
ep
,
cannon...
y.
Daring.indd 1 18/11/09 18:46:29
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