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Getty ImagesLev Fedoseyev
Last night, Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, suffered serious damage when the floating drydock in which it was being repaired sank. According to reports from Radio Free Europe, 71 shipyard workers were evacuated when the drydock suddenly began to fill with water. Four workers were injured, one seriously, and a fifth is missing. The carrier, or what was left of it, anyway, was later towed out of the drydock to a nearby shipyard, the 35th Repair Plant.
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When the drydock sank, the aging Kuznetsov—or more properly the Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Kuznetsov—was in the middle of a much-needed overhaul at the 1,082–foot long, 219–foot wide, PD-50 drydock in Kola Bay near Murmansk. The facility is one of only two in Russia capable of holding ships as large as Kuznetsov and Moscow’s remaining Kirov-class battlecruisers. It could hold ships displacing up to 80,000 tons.
According to Reuters, a power outage at the repair plant set the event off. The outage caused the drydock’s ballast tanks to fill rapidly, sinking the entire thing. At the time, the Kuznetsov was in the process of leaving the drydock, so it was able to extricate itself from the sinking facility.
The ship did not escape unscathed. Reuters reports that a 70-ton crane fell on the carrier when the drydock sank, punching a sixteen foot wide hole in the hull and flight deck of the ship. It may be the final piece of bad luck for the famously hapless vehicle. Over the last several decades, the Kuznetsov had already been beset by fires, budget cuts, and busted steam boilers. It’s so unreliable that a tugboat has been following it around on long voyages like a shadow.
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The Soviet Union’s first full-deck aircraft carrier, the Kuznetsov was commissioned in 1990 and inherited by Russia upon the breakup of the USSR. In the immediate post-Cold War years, it rarely went to sea—conducting only six patrols between 1991 and 2015. In 2009, an electrical accident killed a crewman off the coast of Turkey. But Russia has repeatedly pushed the ship into service, and a 2016 mission off the coast of Syria saw the ship lose two jets in just three weeks.
Before it smashed a hole in the hull, the current refit was originally expected to keep the Kuznetsov chugging along for another (perhaps optimistic?) 25 years. The upgrade was set to involve replacing four of the ship’s eight turbo-pressurized boilers, refurbishing the other four, and making improvements to the flight deck, hangar, and electronic warfare, communication, intelligence, navigation, and combat control capabilities. But just last year, the upgrade budget was slashed in half, and a new TASS report says the ship will receive new boilers, upgrades to flight operations equipment, and the Pantsir-M close-in defense system.
That is, if it doesn’t run out of gas, burst into flames, fall off a cliff, and sink to the bottom of the ocean first.
