Canadian Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

Man the Canadian navy seems to be falling apart. Maybe they should partner with the USN and procure some Burke's I mean Canada and the US have a relationship that is far closer then anyone save for Britain.

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15 year old said:

Canada doesn't need a ship like the Burke. A ship similar to 045 or Horizon would be perfect.

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Pointblank said:

I've been advised that one design being studied in particular has been a variant of the Danish Iver Huitfeldt class frigates. The DND is really focused on the Thales Smart-L and APAR radar sets, as the Canadian government has funded development of these radars.

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15 year old said:

Canada doesn't need a ship like the Burke. A ship similar to 045 or Horizon would be perfect.

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Heavy lift at North Vancouver's Seaspan shipyard

Look up. Look way, way up.

There's a blue behemoth on the North Vancouver waterfront - Seaspan's massive new gantry crane, which this week became the most visible part of the shipyard's $200 million modernization project.

"There were a lot of high fives around here today," said Brian Carter, president of Vancouver Shipyards on Wednesday. "It represents a significant milestone."

The crane, which can lift 300 tonnes, was shipped from China in three pieces and erected on the east side of the Vancouver Shipyards site this week.

The rectangular-shaped crane stands 80 metres tall and runs on rails within the shipyard site.

While the final structural piece of the crane - the main horizontal girder - was lifted into place over several hours on Wednesday, it will still take several more months to install the cables, hydraulics and other systems to get the crane ready for work.

The crane will do the heavy lifting when the shipyard starts building vessels under the federal government's $8 billion National Shipbuilding Program this fall. Ships will be built in separate pieces before the parts are moved into place by the crane for final assembly.

Once it is operational, the gantry crane will be the largest of its type in Canada, said Brian Carter, president of Vancouver Shipyards. The total cost of the crane, installed, is between $15 million and $20 million.

Carter said there has been plenty of interest in the crane as it went up this week.

"You can see this thing from a long way," he said. "People understand what it represents, which is economic interest on the North Shore."

Seaspan will officially name the new crane later this spring when it chooses a winner from among 228 entries submitted by North Shore students from grades 4 to 7. In order to erect the gantry crane, an even taller, stronger crane had to be brought to the Vancouver Shipyards site to lift the pieces into place.

That crane - a large crawler crane with a 115- metre long boom and capacity to lift 1,350 tonnes - was shipped from Russia by the company contracted to get the gantry crane up and running. The crawler crane itself was put together from 80 truckloads of parts, said Carter.

At a height about 35 stories, it's been attracting quite a lot of attention on the North Vancouver waterfront, he said. "It's the tallest thing on the North Shore."

That crane will be taken down when its work is finished.

Work on the shipyard's modernization project is about 75 per cent complete, said Carter, and is on track to be finished by the end of October this year. It includes construction of four new buildings on the site.

Seaspan will begin working on the federal shipbuilding program this fall, with construction of an offshore fisheries science vessel.

That project is scheduled to start in October and take about 18 months. Seaspan will build three fisheries science ships and an oceanographic vessel before starting work on the two joint support ships for the navy and polar icebreaker sometime between late 2016 and 2017. Those ships will be the biggest ships ever built in western Canada.

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The Royal Canadian Navy has lost the use of another one of its air defence destroyers after rust was found in the hull, leaving the fleet further diminished as more than a dozen other vessels undergo regular maintenance, modernization and repairs.

HMCS Iroquois was tied up in Halifax sometime in mid-April after corrosion was detected in a machinery space in the warship that has also been plagued by structural cracks.

Cmdr. Jay Harwood says the vessel is undergoing an assessment to determine if it needs repairs, what that might cost and whether fixing the 42-year-old ship might prove too expensive before it is due to be decommissioned in the next few years.

"We recognize the need to assess what we're seeing here and make a well-founded engineering judgment," Harwood, who oversees the fleet's engineering state, said Wednesday in an interview.

"There were some areas of concern identified with respect to her structure and right now we're just assessing the overall state of her structure to confirm that she's safe to continue operations at sea."

Harwood would not specify where the corrosion was found or reveal how extensive it is, saying only that it is in the interior and that a navy dive team had inspected the vessel's underside to make sure it hadn't permeated the hull.

This latest setback removes a vital asset from the fleet and reduces certain critical capabilities, says defence analyst Martin Shadwick.

The destroyers serve as command and control vessels, but are also the only naval ships that have long-range air defence missile systems, he said.

One destroyer ready

With HMCS Iroquois indefinitely out of commission and its sister ship, HMCS Algonquin, undergoing repairs from an accident in February, the navy has only one destroyer at the ready.

It is also without many of its Halifax-class frigates, which are undergoing a lengthy modernization program to add radar and command and control systems, while upgrading radar and missile capabilities.

Shadwick said that could make it difficult to find ships to do fisheries patrols or participate in missions aimed at countering piracy, smuggling or drug trafficking, as well as any unexpected missions.

"At the exact time that your destroyer numbers are slipping, maybe permanently, you're also missing a lot of the frigates," he said.

"So the bottom line is, you're short of hulls and have fewer to send anywhere. ... Whatever you're using them for, you just don't have the ships."

That leaves the navy down eight vessels on each coast, with five in modernization and 11 undergoing repairs or maintenance. Out of 33 ships and submarines, only 17 are in service or "employable," according to the navy.

This latest problem comes after fatigue cracks were found on the Iroquois in February when the ship was in Boston. An engineering team travelled to the U.S. to inspect it and deemed it safe to return to its home port in Halifax.

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Pointblank said:

HMCS Iroquois has been sidelined indefinitely due to corrosion in the machinery spaces :

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