News
Cammell Laird Shiprepairers & Shipbuilders Ltd
The RRS Sir David Attenborough is a vessel owned by the Natural Environment Research Council which will be operated by the British Antarctic Survey for the purposes of both research and logistic support. The ship is intended to replace a pair of existing vessels, RRS James Clark Ross and RRS Ernest Shackleton. The vessel is named after famed broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough.
The first steel for the construction of the ship was cut in July 2016. The keel laying ceremony for the ship, yard number 1390, took place on 17 October 2016. Cammell Laird, the shipbuilding contractor responsible for the vessel’s construction, commissioned ABLE Instruments & Controls Ltd for the supply of a diverse instrument package to equip the Sir David Attenborough with a range of pressure and temperature switches and transmitters for critical pump & compressor protection duties, instrument air and cold room monitoring. ABLE are also supplying a variety of level controls for waste water tanks, drain tanks, expansion tanks and settling tanks, and some high end moisture in oil detectors for measuring water in fuel and lube oils. The ship will be constructed by combining individually fabricated blocks, much like the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The majority of the blocks will be manufactured by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, but due to a tight schedule, the stern of the ship (named ‘Block 10’) was fabricated at the A&P Group on the River Tyne. The section was transported to Merseyside on a barge in August 2017. The stern section was loaded onto the barge by heavy lifting company ALE, using self-propelled modular trailers (SPMT). The same procedure in reverse was then used to get the hull segment on to the slipway at Birkenhead. The hull of Sir David Attenborough was named by her namesake and launched on 14 July 2018. She was moved into a wet dock for the addition of her superstructure and fitting out. The ship is scheduled to be completed by October 2018.