In Soviet Russia, fire shoots out of Aircraft Carrier. Russia's only remaining aircraft carrier is on fire. Built during the cold war, the Admiral Kuznetsov is the only one of the Soviet Union-era aircraft carriers still in service with the Russian Navy. The other two were sold off to India and China.
The class had been plagued with mechanical problems that are a huge problem with the Chinese and Indian examples with boilers that would randomly catch fire. Not to mention it is pretty much cursed with accidents, with accidents at sea, aircraft landings, etc. When it was in dry dock last year, the entire dock caught on fire.
Maybe this will mark the end of Russian fixed wing naval air power.
Quote:
The Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia's only aircraft carrier, caught fire today during repairs in Murmansk. While officials of the shipyard said that no shipyard workers were injured, Russia's TASS news service reports that at least 12 people (likely Kuznetsov sailors) were injured, some critically. In addition, three people, possibly including the third-rank captain in charge of the ship's repairs, are unaccounted for.
The Kuznetsov has had a long string of bad luck, experiencing fires at sea, oil spills, and landing deck accidents—including a snapped arresting wire that caused a landing Sukhoi Su-33 fighter to roll off the end of the deck and into the ocean. Its boilers belched black smoke during the ship's transit to Syria in 2016, and it had to be towed back home after breaking down during its return in 2017. Then last year, as it was undergoing repairs in a floating drydock in Murmansk's Shipyard 82, the drydock sank and a crane on the drydock slammed into the Kuznetsov, leaving a gash in the ship's hull. It looked like completion of repairs might be put off indefinitely because repair of the drydock would take over a year, and the budget for repairs had been slashed.
The fire was caused when sparks from welding work near one of the ship's electrical distribution compartments set a cable on fire. The fire spread through the wiring throughout compartments of the lower deck of the ship, eventually involving 120 square meters (1,300 square feet) of the ship's spaces.
In total, 12 victims were delivered to hospitals, 10 of them were saved during the fire. One is assessed as serious, and one suffered a head injury. Most received poisoning from combustion products, according to a report from TASS.
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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...t-now-on-fire/