Ұлыбритания Корольдік Әскер-теңіз флотының "Арк Ройал" ұшақ тасушысы

1955 Audacious class aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy

HMS Ark Royal (R09) was an aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy and, when she was decommissioned in 1979, was the Royal Navy's last remaining conventional catapult and arrested landing aircraft carrier. She was the first aircraft carrier to be equipped with an angled flight deck at its commissioning; her sister ship, , was the Royal Navy's first angle decked aircraft carrier after modification in 1954. Ark Royal was the only non United States vessel to operate the McDonnell Douglas Phantom at sea.

While Ark Royals career spanned 24 years from the time of her commissioning (her name was a household word), she spent as much time in refit; repair and reserve and modernisation as in commissioned service (12 years). It required a lot of effort from her engineers to keep her serviceable between yard periods. Ark Royal had been poorly preserved during her lengthy construction and spent far more time at sea than her sister. The scrapping of Ark Royal in 1980, two years after Eagle, marked the end of conventional fixed wing aircraft operations aboard Royal Navy carriers. She had borne so many innovations, yet her replacement was not equipped with any of these. There was some discussion about preserving her as a museum ship, and some private funds were raised; the MOD would not sanction these efforts. The Fleet Air Arm Museum has subsequently mimicked the ship's island and flight deck in its central hall as an Aircraft Carrier Experience exhibition. The remained in service after her, but had been converted to a helicopter commando carrier in 1971, and then as a V/STOL carrier. The much smaller could carry only vertical/short takeoff and landing aircraft and helicopters. The two new carriers, which were commissioned in 2017 and 2019, were originally designed to operate V/STOL aircraft. Despite expert advice, and in an attempt to reduce costs, the UK government requested that the new carriers be modified to operate conventional CATOBAR (catapult assisted takeoff and barrier/arrested recovery) aircraft. Fitting electromagnetic catapults would have required huge structural changes and an upgrade of the ships' energy generation, which proved unfeasible, and resulted in a decision to return to the original configuration.