Sea
trials of an Indian Navy aircraft carrier refitted by a Russian shipyard
were unsuccessful due to design failures in the vessel's boilers, Russian
daily Vedomosti wrote on Tuesday quoting the shipyard's former director
Oleg Shulyakovsky.
The ship's handover to the Indian Navy was put back from December 2012
to at least October 2013 after propulsion failures occured when the
Vikramaditya, formerly the Russian Navy's Admiral Gorshkov, underwent
sea trials in the White Sea last month.
Shulyakovsky says three of the carrier's eight boilers failed,
but the ship still managed to stay underway and reached 23 knots, below
its design speed of 29 knots.
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Boiler
failures were a legacy of the original vessel's design, he said, with
propulsion snags being a persistent feature of the four Project 1143
carriers built in the Soviet Union in the 1970's. The carriers boilers
lasted just 20 percent of the design life stated by their makers, he
said.
The replacement boilers installed as part of the vessel's $2.3 billion
refit were guaranteed for just ten months, which expired before the
ship took to sea, he said.
Specialists from the Baltisky Shipyard and boiler design bureau are
already at Sevmash shipyard, where the carrier will arrive in the next
few weeks. Engineers are focusing on the boilers' heat insulation as
the core of the problem. Repairs could take from four months to a year
depending on the damage to the insulation, he said.
The worst case would be damage to the pipes carrying steam from the
boilers, Shulyakovsky said. The pipes are made from a special steel
which is no longer made in Russia. The steel used in Vikramaditya's
pipes was made in Ukraine.
A defense industry official quoted by Kommersant newspaper on Monday,
who prepared the Vikramaditya for sea trials, said the reason for the
boilers’ failure was that India refused to use asbestos to protect
the boilers from heat, fearing that the material was dangerous for the
crew. Instead, it used firebrick, which had poorer insulating properties.
The purchase and refit of the Vikramaditya has experienced a long-running
catalog of failures and setbacks.
India and Russia signed the $947 million dollar deal in 2005 for the
purchase of the carrier, with an original deadline for the refit's completion
of 2008. Delivery was delayed twice, pushing up the cost of refurbishing
the carrier to $2.3 billion.
Both sides were locked in protracted arguments over who would pay the
extra costs, as it became clear that the refit would be much more complicated
than originally envisaged. A new agreement was signed in 2009 with the
Indians agreeing to pay for the extra work needed.
Another Sevmash shipyard director, Vladimir Pastukhov, was fired in
2007 over his poor management of the project.
The Vikramaditya was originally built as the Soviet Project 1143.4 class
aircraft carrier Baku.
The ship was laid down in 1978 at the Nikolayev South shipyard in Ukraine,
launched in 1982, and commissioned with the Soviet Navy in 1987.
It was renamed Admiral Gorshkov after the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991. In 1994, the Admiral Gorshkov sat in dock for a year for repairs
after a boiler room explosion. In 1995, it briefly returned to service
but was finally withdrawn and put up for sale in 1996.
The ship has a displacement of 45,000 tons, a maximum speed of 32 knots
and an endurance of 13,500 nautical miles (25,000 km) at a cruising
speed of 18 knots.
India has already started taking delivery of the MiG-29K naval fighter
aircraft for the Vikramaditya, as they were ready before the refit was
completed. The MiG-29Ks will operate in STOBAR (short take-off but assisted
recovery via arresting wires) mode. |
