Revealed: Rescue tug crashed into stranded submarine HMS Astute causing millions of pounds of damage

THE tug sent to rescue the Navy's grounded showpiece submarine crashed into her and tore off one of her fins, the Record can reveal.

And insiders fear the damage from the collision will cost millions to fix.

We have learned that HMS Astute got away with relatively minor dents when she got stuck on a shingle bank off Skye two weeks ago.

But when Coastguard tug Anglian Prince tried to pull the £1billion nuclear-powered sub free, the two vessels collided.

The impact ripped off Astute's starboard foreplane, one of her navigation fins.

A source said last night: "The damage from the grounding was minor. Astute just had some denting to her casing, which is nothing massively serious for a ship of her size.

"But the damage done by the tug could result in a multi-million pound repair bill. It's ironic."

It's understood the Anglian Prince ran into Astute after her crew attached a tow rope to the sub.

We have been told the rope got snagged in the tug's propellers and the two vessels were pulled together.

The repairs to Astute, described as the world's most modern submarine, are expected to take weeks. Sources say she's not likely to be able to resume her sea trials before March next year.

Astute got stuck near the Skye Bridge on the morning of October 22 as her crew practised transferring personnel from shore to the sub during the trials.

The 100-metre long vessel was stranded for 10 hours as bemused locals gathered on the shore to take photos.

The Anglian Prince was sent from her base in Stornoway to rescue her and the Astute was dragged free at about 6pm.

Divers checked her hull for damage before she headed back to her base at Faslane on the Clyde under her own power.

She was hauled from the water last Thursday so experts could examine her hull and rudder.

A Navy spokesman confirmed last night: "There was a collision between Astute and a tug, which resulted in damage to the submarine's starboard foreplane.

"This will be repaired at Faslane and trials will resume in due course.

"The inquiry into the damage sustained by Astute is now complete, although the findings have still to be released to naval officers."

The Navy has also launched an inquiry into why the sub ran aground.

Reports at the time said she was outside a safe sea lane, clearly marked on Admiralty charts, at the time. A Navy spokesman said last month: "One of the things being looked at is if the charts were up to date with recent seabed changes in the area. The seabed can change quickly."

The probe will look at possible negligence by the crew. The Navy have refused to speculate on whether the Astute's commander, Andy Coles, could face a court martial.

Astute, the first in a class of six new submarines, was launched in 2007 and formally commissioned into the Navy this August.

She weighs 7800 tons - as much as nearly 1000 double-decker buses.

Her nuclear reactor means she will never have to be refuelled and she makes her own air and water supplies. She can sail around the world without having to surface.

She doesn't carry nuclear weapons but is armed with Spearfish torpedoes and Tomahawk cruise missiles which can hit targets 1200 miles away.

The sub has 39,000 acoustic panels on her surface which mask her sonar signature and allow her to sneak up on enemy ships.

The Coastguard tug fleet was set up in 1994 after the Braer oil spill off Shetland. It is on standby 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and is kept at 30 minutes "readiness to sail".

But days before the Anglian Prince rescued Astute, the Con-Dems announced that the tugs were being axed to save money.

The SNP MP for the Western Isles, Angus MacNeil, said: "The most expensive and advanced submarine in the world has had to be pulled to safety by the tugboat which the Westminster government wants to scrap.

"The Anglian Prince is a vital service. It is regrettable that it is to be removed."

Scots passenger tells of mid-air drama after Qantas A380 superjumbo suffers engine explosion

Nov 4 2010

Qantas A380 engine exposed after mid-air explosion

AN engine on a giant "superjumbo" with 459 people on board exploded in flames today, sending chunks of debris slicing through the wing.

Horrified families on the Qantas flight from Heathrow to Sydney watched the blaze from their windows and wondered if they were about to die.

But the huge Airbus A380 landed safely despite the damage to its No2 engine.

And passenger Lars Sandberg, a world-famous DJ from Glasgow, said: "I'm just happy to be alive."

Qantas grounded all six of their A380s for safety checks after the scare.

The double-decker jet suffered a "catastrophic", "uncontained" engine failure at about 2am UK time, 15 minutes after taking off from a stop in Singapore.

Flames spewed from the massive Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine and pieces of debris as big as doors pierced the wing.

Experts said wreckage could easily have torn a hole in the jet's cabin or hit one of its fuel tanks.

Large shards of metal fell on the island of Batam, just south of Singapore, narrowly missing at least one person and crashing through the roof of a school.

Qantas Flight QF32 was carrying 433 passengers and 26 crew. The Foreign Office said a number of Britons were on the flight.

Tyler Wooster, 16, was sitting near a window with his family when he saw the engine blow.

He said: "My whole body went to jelly. I really thought, 'We could go down right now.'

"There was a massive, really loud bang. It was like a shotgun."

Tyler's mum, Sue, added: "We thought, 'What's going to happen? Is it going to crash?'"

Lars, whose stage name is Funk D'Void, was also sitting close to the engine. He said: "There was a sharp bang, the carriage started to vibrate and there was a bit of a smoke. People around me were visibly shaken."

The pilot told passengers: "We're having a technical issue with our number two engine. The aircraft is secure at this stage."

He added that the crew would dump fuel to "lighten our load" before returning to Singapore.

German passenger Ulf Waschbusch said there was an "eerie calm" on board.

Lars added: "The captain kept reassuring us, almost every couple of minutes, that things were OK."

The passengers burst into applause after the emergency landing at Changi Airport, where six fire engines were waiting.

"When we got off and saw the back casing burnt off the engine, that was pretty scary," Lars said.

"It was a nerve-wracking experience and I feel a little bit shaken up. I'm just happy to be alive and safe in the terminal building."

People in Batam told how falling debris from the jet narrowly missed their homes.

A woman called Yanestri was heading back inside after hanging out her washing when a piece of the plane crashed down on the spot where she had just been standing. She said: "I was three seconds from death."

Locals said another piece of debris went through the roof of an empty school.

Crash investigators were dwarfed by the huge size of the engine as they began the task of working out why it blew up.

Experts said uncontained engine failures - where debris breaks through the engine casing - were incredibly rare and extremely dangerous.

One pilot wrote on an internet forum: "If a piece of hot turbine had gone through the wing fuel tank, it would have made the Air France Concorde disaster look like a fairly small accident."

French investigators are probing the fire because Airbus are based in Toulouse. A spokeswoman said: "It's a fault on the rear part of the jet motor."

Rolls-Royce build the Trent 900 engines at their factory in Derby. Shares in the company fell five per cent in London after the fire.

There are 37 A380s in service worldwide. As well as the six Qantas jets, Singapore Airlines have 11, Emirates 13, Air France four and Lufthansa three.

Only the Qantas, Singapore and Lufthansa jets have Trent 900s. Singapore Airlines halted A380 flights for checks but the Lufthansa jets continued to fly.

British Airways and Virgin Atlantic have both placed orders for A380s. Neither Qantas nor the A380 have ever been involved in a fatal accident.

Death toll climbs to almost 100 after fresh eruption of volcano Mount Merapi in Indonesia

Nov 5 2010

BLISTERING gas from Indonesia's most volatile volcano spewed farther than expected today, incinerating houses at the edge of the danger zone, triggering chaotic evacuations and pushing the death toll in more than a week to nearly 100.

Soldiers joined rescue operations in Bronggang, nine miles from the mouth of the crater, pulling charred corpses from smouldering homes and then lifting them into the backs of trucks caked in grey dust.

Dozens of injured, most with severe burns, were carried away on stretchers.

"We're totally overwhelmed here!" said Heru Nogroho, a spokesman at the Sardjito hospital, as the number of bodies dropped off at their mortuary climbed to 54 - the deadliest day Mount Merapi has seen in 80 years.

More than 70 others were injured, many critically, with severe burns.

Merapi's booming explosion just after midnight triggered a panicked evacuation.

Men with ash-covered faces streamed down the scorched slopes on motorcycles, followed by truckloads of women and children, many crying.

Officials barked out orders on bullhorns as rocks and debris rained from the sky.

Up until today the village of Bronggang, home to around 80 families, was considered to be within the safety zone.

Mount Merapi, which means Fire Mountain, has erupted many times in the last century, often with deadly results.

In 1994, over a period of several days, 60 people were killed, while in 1930, more than a dozen villages were torched, leaving up to 1,300 dead.

The greatest danger is always pyroclastic flows, like those that roared down the southern slopes today.

Cities and towns more than 100 miles away were dusted.

Activity at the mountain forced an airport in nearby Yogyakarta to close today because runways were covered in heavy white ash. It was not clear when it would reopen, said Agus Andriyanto, who oversees operations.

Subandrio, a state volcanologist, meanwhile, said Mount Merapi's "danger zone" was extended by three miles to 12 miles from the crater's smouldering mouth after the new eruption.

Even scientists from Merapi's monitoring station were told they had to pack up and move down the mountain.

Revealed: Building one new aircraft carrier would have cost £300m MORE than building two

THE controversial "two for one" deal that locked the government into building two supercarriers at Rosyth and the Clyde was finally revealed yesterday.

The figures show that it would have cost £300million more to build just one Navy supercarrier instead of two.

The details are in the contract struck between military contractor BAE Systems and the government.

Chancellor George Osborne released a confidential letter from BAE Systems boss Ian King to the Prime Minister yesterday showing that building both carriers will cost £5.25billion.

Cancelling one, would cost - with penalties - £5.49billion.

If one carrier was scrapped the programme would still cost £4.8billion. But the letter stressed that there would be a further £690million of "rationalisation" costs which would make it cheaper to keep both ships.

The government have decided to go ahead with two carriers, securing thousands of jobs.

But the MoD are so cash-strapped that one of the new carriers will be mothballed and the other, which will put to sea in 2016, will have no jets to fly off its decks until 2020.

It will then enter a "timeshare" deal with the French navy to provide carrier cover for both countries.

Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the Treasury select committee, said that BAE had effectively held a "gun to the head of the government" over the "deeply flawed" contracts.

BAE Systems totally denied that they had snookered the government into going ahead. A spokesman said: "We pointed out the implications of taking certain decisions."

The letter from King also emphasised the human and economic cost of not going ahead with the second carrier.

BAE yards across the country would close in 2013 with the loss of more than 5000 jobs and many more in downstream industries.

The move would also spell the end to the UK's capacity to build complex warships.

Giving evidence to the Treasury select committee, Osborne stopped short of directly accusing former PM Gordon Brown of putting the interest of the Roysth yard, next to his own Kirkcaldy constituency, ahead of that of the wider public.

He told MPs: "I will leave this committee and the public to draw their own conclusions about the last point."

Earlier this week, Brown gave his first speech in the Commons since the election, arguing that maintenance of the two new carriers should be carried out at Rosyth rather than in France.

On Wednesday, Lib Dem Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said there should be an audit office investigation into how the deal was struck with BAE Systems.