HMS Artful Submarine to be Officially Commissioned
The Royal Navy's latest submarine, HMS Artful, will be officially commissioned at a ceremony today.
It will take place at Faslane naval base on the Clyde, with representatives of the Royal Navy and the companies that built the vessel present.
Guest of honor at the ceremony will be the submarine's sponsor Lady Amanda Zambellas, who named the vessel during its launch in 2014.
Artful, the third of the Royal Navy’s new Astute-class attack submarines, has been busy conducting her final Contractor Sea Trials ahead of her maiden deployment.
The sophisticated submarine sailed from Barrow-in-Furness in August last year for her new home at HM Naval Base Clyde and since then has been proving her systems and equipment at sea.
These demanding trials also enable her crew to familiarise themselves with how the boat handles in a variety of testing situations as they prepare for operations.
"These trials are hugely important as they prove the submarine’s primary capability as a weapon system," said Commander Stuart Armstrong, Artful’s Commanding Officer.
The highlight of the recent trials was the firing of six Training Variants of the Royal Navy’s heavyweight Spearfish torpedo on the British Underwater Testing and Evaluation Centre near the Isle of Skye.
These firings were the most complex of the trials conducted to date as they required a large number of interconnected systems to function together – from loading the torpedoes into their tubes through to the sonar detecting the target and the command system preparing a firing solution.
