AEW - Gannets & Bulwark for the Falklands
Ancient history now but may be of some interest to the users of this website. During the Falklands war I had the privilege of serving in a Portsmouth ship which CinCFleet recognised was nominally active, but too old and unreliable to be sent down south. So I did see the attempts to raise steam on the (rusty B) HMS Bulwark. Despite clouds of smoke from her funnel, anecdotally and with no hard evidence, I understand that attempts to fire the boilers and turn main engines were a failure. Had that succeded there might have been an undermanned and re-actvated third flat top on its way south before the end of May 82. Certainly she would have been capable of launching AEW Gannets (no ski ramp on the bow) had the normal winds prevailed and she could have got 20 knots water speed. Neither of these of course would have been available every (any) day. More problematic would have been recovery because of the lack of angled deck or arrestor wires. Would at best have been dicey, more realistically a death trap for the crews?
However my understanding is that all became academic because whilst the urgent review of scrapheap gannets and museum versions, the issue was not getting one airborne, it was the availability of the radar and spares for it. They could not be found nor could the fighter directors in the carriers see the gannet radar as the tv powered UHF downlinks from the radar had been scrapped. So the efforts to reactivate Bulwark were overtaken by the work on the container ships converted to ferry carriers and the re-activation of gannets was aborted. Lots of anecdote in this, but it seems to fit what others have written above and what I saw happening to Bulwark.