We’re very proud to have played our part in getting Britain’s flagship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, home to Portsmouth following four months of repairs in Scotland and a seven-day spell at sea to test her systems.

The 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier left Rosyth Dockyard a week ago after arriving there in March for unscheduled work in dry dock to her shaft lines.

The ship emerged sooner than initially forecast from repairs and, after sailing under the Forth Bridges, has spent the last seven days at sea being put through her paces on trials to test her systems to the maximum.

This has included marine engineering trials, sailing at high speed for extended periods of time and manoeuvring as aggressively as possible to give the command team full confidence in her systems following the docking period.

The nation’s flagship is now preparing for operations this autumn.

Duncan Humphery, DE&S’ Capital Ships Team Leader, said:

“Getting HMS Queen Elizabeth back to Portsmouth ahead of schedule was a fantastic effort across the whole Enterprise of D&ES, Ship’s company, Babcock and BAE for which we should all be immensely proud.”

Drawing on previous experience, the Capital Ships team in DES reacted quickly to set the requirements for the docking and established the commercial arrangements to dock HMS Queen Elizabeth to create the best outcome.

Capt Humphery continued:

“Then, with all stakeholders working together, we removed many of the risks, enabling us to turnaround this massive engineering project in 17 weeks.”

He added:

“The only risk we were unable to control was the weather.”

Commanding Officer of HMS Queen Elizabeth, Captain Will King, said:

“Whilst no warship wants to find itself spending unscheduled time out of the water, I am enormously proud of the work that has gone on in Rosyth.

“Everybody on board is looking forward to getting back to sea, where we belong, and picking up a busy programme in the autumn.”