ILLUSTRIOUS Back At Work – the Aircraft Carrier ILLUSTRIOUS, now rated as a Helicopter Carrier, visited Copenhagen for four days en route to participating in the two week NATO Exercise Cold Response.  Apart from 4,500 visitors, who looked around the vast (vast in Danish terms) ship, 60 officers under training on board paid a visit to the Royal Danish Naval Academy.

The ILLUSTRIOUS went the refit at Rosyth in February 2010 fully expecting to return to service as a fully functioning aircraft carrier with fast jets (HARRIERs) but the Strategic Defence and Security Review of October 2010 changed all that with the decision that the Aircraft Carrier ARK ROYAL would decommissioned "almost immediately" (rather than in 2014) and that the HARRIERs would be retired and subsequently flogged off the Americans at a knock down price.   Both of these measures it was claimed were to save money for the purchase of the QUEEN ELIZABETH class of Aircraft Carriers.

This left the ILLUSTRIOUS stranded in dock as either the Helicopter Carrier OCEAN or the ILLUSTRIOUS were to be decommissioned, whichever is least capable BUT it was decided (after a short study) in December 2010, that OCEAN should be retained to provide our landing platform helicopter capability for the longer term, and in May 2011 ILLUSTRIOUS was made operationally ready after a £40 million refit, handed back to the fleet after sea trials in late July 2011, and has taken up the Helicopter Carrier role.    The ILLUSTRIOUS will cover for the OCEAN when that ship undergoes a planned refit, due for completion by 2014, and thus the ILLUSTRIOUS will be withdrawn from service in 2014.