French aircraft carrier Clemenceau

Clemenceau

Clemenceau under way in 1981
History
France
Name	Clemenceau
Namesake	Georges Clemenceau
Builder	Brest shipyard
Laid down	November 1955
Launched	21 December 1957
Commissioned	22 November 1961
Decommissioned	1 October 1997
Homeport	Brest
Identification	R98
Fate	Scrapped 2009–2010
General characteristics
Class and type	Clemenceau-class aircraft carrier
Displacement	22,000 tons (standard) 32,780 tons (loaded)
Length	265 m (869 ft 5 in)
Beam	51.2 m (168 ft 0 in)
Draught	8.6 m (28 ft 3 in)
Installed power	6 Indret boilers 126,000 shp (94,000 kW)
Propulsion	4 steam turbines
Speed	32 knots (59 km/h; 37 mph)
Capacity	582 air group personnel
Complement	1,338 (aircraft carrier) 984 (helicopter carrier)
Sensors and processing systems	1 DRBV-23B air sentry radar 1 DRBV-50 low altitude or surface sentry radar (later replaced by a DRBV-15) 1 NRBA-50 approach radar 2 DRBI-10 tri-dimensional air sentry radar Multiple DRBN-34 navigation radars Multiple DRBC-31 fire direction radars (later replaced by DRBC-32C radars)
Armament	8 100 mm turrets (of which 4 replaced in the 1990s by 2 SACP Crotale EDIR systems with 52 missiles) 5 12.7 mm machine guns
Aircraft carried	Up to 40 aircraft: 15 Super Étendard 4 Étendard IVP 8 F-8E(FN) Crusader 8 Alizé 2 Dauphin Pedro 2 Super Frelon

Clemenceau (French pronunciation: [klemɑ̃so]) was the French Navy's sixth aircraft carrier and the lead ship of her class. The carrier served from 1961 to 1997 and was dismantled and recycled in 2009.^[1][2] The carrier was the second French warship to be named after Georges Clemenceau, the first being a Richelieu-class battleship laid down in 1939 but never finished.

Clemenceau and her sister ship Foch served as the mainstays of the French fleet. During the carrier's career, Clemenceau sailed more than 1,000,000 nautical miles (1,900,000 km; 1,200,000 mi) during 3,125 days at sea. She was equipped to handle nuclear munitions to be delivered by her air complement and was later modified to fire nuclear-capable missiles. She took part in numerous exercises and cruises, seeing action during the Lebanese Civil War and Gulf War and in air operations over the former Yugoslavia.