Aircraft carrier arrives at on the Clyde in Scotland

HMS Queen Elizabeth has arrived in Scotland, sailing up the Firth of Clyde and into Loch Long to the jetty at Glenmallan, the Royal Navy has confirmed to the UK Defence Journal.

Commander Adrian Visram, a Royal Navy spokesperson, told us: “HMS Queen Elizabeth is currently in Glenmallan completing a short logistics and engagement stop before continuing on operations.”

The 65,000-tonne carrier sailed from Portsmouth earlier this month for three months of training and operations around the United Kingdom and northern Europe, in her role as NATO’s command ship for the Allied Response Force, a role she assumed in July and one neither Queen Elizabeth-class ship had performed before.

Glenmallan sits on the western shore of Loch Long in Argyll, and its jetty is the only facility on the west coast able to take a ship of the carriers’ size alongside, which is why both Queen Elizabeth-class vessels have called there repeatedly since it was rebuilt.

The jetty itself underwent a £67 million upgrade under a contract awarded to VolkerStevin in 2019, with Jacobs as managing agent and Arch Henderson as designer. It had last been upgraded in the 1970s and had reached the end of its economic life. Around £20 million of that work went to local suppliers and small and medium-sized enterprises in Scotland, and the project extended the jetty’s life by an estimated fifty years while making it accessible to the carriers.

The work involved installing four new navigational aids to allow safe passage through the confined waterway, two modular fender spacer units that move with the tide to keep the flight deck clear of the jetty, and dolphin mooring points to hold a ship of that size securely.

As we reported at the end of April, the last Queen Elizabeth-class carrier to make the trip was HMS Prince of Wales, which called at Glenmallan ahead of Operation Firecrest. That deployment, announced by the Prime Minister at the Munich Security Conference in February, took the carrier strike group across the North Atlantic and the High North, with Prince of Wales leading the force.

Firecrest was designed to deter Russian aggression, protect critical undersea infrastructure and demonstrate the ability to project force at scale within a NATO framework, against a background of a 30 per cent increase in Russian naval vessels threatening British waters over the preceding two years. It included activity under NATO’s Arctic Sentry mission and exercises alongside Standing NATO Maritime Group One, which Britain has led throughout 2026.

Queen Elizabeth’s own programme runs on a different track from her sister’s, and she will undertake advanced training under Flag Officer Sea Training, exercising across the spectrum of modern naval warfare, and will rehearse how an allied naval force would operate together in a crisis. The programme continues into next year with participation in major NATO exercises, preparing her to take over from Prince of Wales as fleet flagship and high readiness strike carrier in late 2027.

The Royal Navy has linked the deployment to the £240 million committed in the Defence Investment Plan towards developing drones for a Hybrid Carrier Air Wing, including jet-powered types intended to operate alongside the F-35B.

The first visit by a Queen Elizabeth-class ship to the upgraded jetty came in March 2021, when Queen Elizabeth called there during final preparations for her maiden operational deployment, the first time she had visited western Scotland after becoming a familiar sight on the Forth during her assembly at Rosyth.

On the way up the Clyde the ship paused over the wreck of HMS Dasher, the escort carrier lost on 27 March 1943 with 379 of her company, and laid a wreath. The ship posted afterwards that “the lessons from the tragedy improved the safety of carrier aviation. We still benefit from those lessons.”

Dasher was a converted merchant hull operating in the Firth of Clyde when an internal explosion sank her within minutes, and the inquiry that followed changed how aviation fuel was stored and handled aboard carriers.