HMS Artful Submarine to be Officially Commissioned
The Royal Navy's latest submarine, HMS Artful, will be officially commissioned at a ceremony today. It will take place at Faslane naval base on the Clyde, with representatives of the Royal Navy and the companies that built the vessel present. Guest of honor at the ceremony will be the submarine's sponsor Lady Amanda Zambellas, who named the vessel during its launch in 2014. Artful, the third of the Royal Navy’s new Astute-class attack submarines, has been busy conducting her final Contractor Sea Trials ahead of her maiden deployment. The sophisticated submarine sailed from Barrow-in-Furness in August last year for her new home at HM Naval Base Clyde and since then has been proving her systems and equipment at sea.
Beer-bottle Christening for Latest UK Navy Submarine
The new submarine was named 'Artful' in a traditional ceremony at the BAE Systems shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness. Marking this milestone in the vessel’s construction, Lady Amanda Zambellas, the wife of First Sea Lord Admiral Sir George Zambellas, named the submarine in the classic tradition of breaking a bottle on her bow; in this instance a bottle of beer from a local Cumbrian brewery. The naming ceremony comes just 2 months after MOD announced that the first 2 of the 7 Astute Class submarines…