French frigate FS Aquitaine berthed at Fairlie Quay on the west coast of Scotland today.

The visit, described as routine, isn’t the first time the vessel has visited Scotland. She has previously sailed up the Clyde into Glasgow.

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Aquitaine is the lead ship of her class of frigates, which in turn were developed by the FREMM multipurpose frigate programme.

Recently, nuclear submarines from France and the U.S. were recently berthed in HMNB Clyde at Faslane near Glasgow in Scotland.

The American submarine was of the Virginia class and the French submarine was of the Rubis class.

The Rubis Class

The French Navy operates six Rubis Amethyste class attack submarines from the naval base in Toulon. The submarines, built at the Cherbourg Naval Dockyard of DCN, are the Rubis S601 commissioned in 1983, Saphir S602 (1984), Casabianca S603 (1987), Emeraude S604 (1988), Amethyste S605 (1992) and Perle S606 (1993).

The first Rubis hull was laid down in December 1976 and launched in 1979.

George Allison
George Allison
George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison
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13 COMMENTS

  1. Can’t say the FREMM’s have a particularly nice profile (from any angle!).

    Although credit where it’s due The French as good at keeping to a rolling drumbeat of ship construction whereas the Royal Navy will have something like a 25 year gap between frigates being introduced (St Albans in 2002 and the first T26/T31 in 2027) which is frankly shocking!

    • Italians FREMM are not like French ones.
      And France have 8 FREMM from 17 it should have. Production is already closed.

    • Mark Felton indeed, the quality of that reminds me of my art school film efforts from the early 80s though at least I used a decent voice over in the form of John Hedges to make them at least sound professional. Honestly you gotta love the stock use of terms like ‘defence analysts’ to try to add gravitas to the contrived commentary despite no mention of who these apparent experts are, I suspect probably himself in reality, let’s be honest you could be using the term ‘media analyst’ or ‘history analyst’ or ‘political analyst’ to back your contentions when in reality you are simply referring to David Icke’s various deluded mutterings. It means nothing without context.

      We all know that these islands as anywhere else is susceptible to a non nuclear first strike but we also know the limitations of Russia doing so without any prior warning and/or to any sustained degree esp in the present circumstances so would be strategic madness. Oh and we aren’t going to introduce a no fly zone which is the whole basis of this opportunist effort so I think we can expect matters to have reached the point where mad Vlad sees no future for himself before he starts thinking about such pure revenge attacks because the consequences would be potentially catastrophic in the other direction.

      • Mad Vlad as you call him, may turn out to be as determined as A.H. was. Apparently the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the consequent overrunning of the Soviet Security forces based in East Berlin, left him emotionally scarred.

  6. What are those twelve boxes hiding behind the port-side jamming pod? Obviously meant to fire something outboard. Presumably replicated on starboard side? Never seen them before.

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