HMS NOTTINGHAM

Four ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Nottingham, named for the city in the East Midlands. The first Nottingham was a 60 gun 4th rate, launched at Deptford in 1703. The ship was rebuilt in the same yard in 1719, rebuilt again at Sheerness in 1745 and sunk as a breakwater at  Sheerness in 1773. These two rebuilds are sometimes counted as separate ships in the lineage.
The second Nottingham was a small gunboat built in 1794. After a relatively short career, the boat was sold in 1800.
The third Nottingham was a cruiser, built in 1913 and sunk by U52 in 1916. The fourth and current Nottingham is a Type 42 destroyer. She was launched in 1980 and commissioned  in 1983. This ship famously ran aground in 2002 during a storm whilst airlifting a sick
crewman to the nearby Lord Howe Island, off the coast of Australia. She has since been repaired and returned to full operational service .The Nottingham, a Type 42 destroyer, was believed to have had 253 crew aboard at the time of the incident, but there were no casualties.
It is the sixth and latest ship to bear the name and was launched on February 18, 1980, by Lady Leach, wife of the then First Sea Lord.
The fifth Nottingham was sunk by U-boat torpedoes in 1916 when on duty in the North Sea in World War I.
The current Nottingham completed a multi-million dollar major refit in November, 2000, which brought her
equipment and systems up to date, including a range of state-of-the-art radar .In 2001, it deployed to the Middle East and this year has been on a busy program in the Asia-Pacific region, taking in places such as Djibouti, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand.
Its motto is Foy Pour Devoir, meaning Faith is my Duty. The Nottingham's skipper is Commander Richard Farrington, OBE, who is familiar with Australia. In 1990 he qualified as a principal warfare officer specialising in communications and electronic warfare and spent two years on exchange with the Royal Australian Navy. Based in Sydney, he deployed to the Persian Gulf for Operation Damask and South-East Asia, as operations officer of the guided missile frigate HMAS Sydney. The ship's own web site quotes Commander Farrington as saying before the current voyage: "Despite the uncertainty surrounding events in the Middle East and our ongoing commitment to the war against terrorism, the ship's company is really looking forward to what looks like the trip of a lifetime. "We are ready for anything." The Type 42 destroyers form the backbone of the Royal Navy's anti-air capability. They are equipped with the Sea Dart medium range air defence missile system which, in its primary role, is designed to provide area air defence to a group of ships, although it is also effective against surface targets at sea.
In addition, the Type 42s operate independently, carrying out patrol and boarding operations, recently enforcing United Nations embargoes in the Persian Gulf and the Adriatic as well as providing humanitarian assistance in Montserrat and East Timor.
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Crippled British warship HMS Nottingham has been loaded onto a heavy-lifting ship in preparation for being piggy-backed back to Britain.  The loading process began in Sydney Harbor early Tuesday morning and took about six hours to complete.
The Royal Navy Type 42 Destroyer nearly sank after it hit well-charted but submerged rocks off the coast of remote Lord Howe Island in the Tasman Sea off the coast of Australia more than three months ago.  Nottingham was first towed backwards to the nearest Australian port, Newcastle, 200 kilometers to the north of Sydney. 

 It was then towed to the deeper waters of Sydney Harbor on October 15 to allow the loading process to begin.  The lift shift, the Swan, is semi-submersible, taking in water to allow it to sink a lifting cradle below the surface of the harbor.  Tugs guided the Nottingham into position over the middle section of the Swan's deck. Swan then pumped out the water and raised the deck up under the warship.  The Royal Navy will spend about another five days securing Nottingham to Swan before the long journey home begins.  The ship is expected to arrive back in Britain by mid-December. Nottingham is believed to be the first ship to have run aground on the Lord Howe reef in about 200 years and a full inquiry into the incident is underway.  The Royal Navy has said Nottingham is repairable.

  

HMS Nottingham refloated
Sea trials and further repairs are still needed on HMS Nottingham
The Royal Navy warship HMS Nottingham has been refloated exactly a year after it nearly sank in the Pacific Ocean.
The destroyer hit rocks and ran aground near Lord Howe Island, 200 miles off the coast of Australia, on July 7, 2002.
Refloating began on Monday and was completed on Tuesday ending seven months in dry dock in Portsmouth, Hampshire.
Repairs, including mending the hull that was ripped open from bow to bridge on the well-charted Wolf Rock, cost £26m.
Fleet Support Limited (FSL), a contractor to the Royal Navy, said everything had gone according to plan.
"She is back in the water and everything is OK.
"She will be moved out of the dock some time in the next couple of weeks.
"There is still a lot of electrical work and systems work to be done and she doesn't get ready for her sea trials until next April," a spokesman added. Major work would still need to be completed on the 3,560-tonne vessel before she returned to frontline duties.
The Ministry of Defence said earlier that it cost about £3m to bring HMS Nottingham back to the UK from Sydney, welded to the back of the Dutch-registered heavy lifting vessel MV Swan. The accident gouged a hole in the bow of Type 42 destroyer as well as ripping a 100ft scar down the side of the vessel. Miles of cable
The hull repair involved the removal and replacement of 100 tonnes of steelwork as well as the removal and repair of damaged machinery, including the ship's turbines. Internally, a total of 15 miles of cable have been removed and will be replaced. The ship's sonar, which was destroyed in the accident, will also be replaced. Commander Richard Farrington and three of his senior officers will appear before a tribunal later this year in relation to the grounding.