Oxley Developments has been awarded a contract by Northrop Grumman to provide detailed engineering of LED navigation and signal lights for the two new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers currently under construction for the British Royal Navy. Under the contract, awarded by Northrop Grumman Sperry Marine, Oxley will provide engineering services for the ships’ navigation and signaling lights, including sidelights, stern light, anchor light, manoeuvring lights and warning signals. The scope of work encompasses eleven different light specifications. LED technology will be implemented throughout, ensuring high reliability, low maintenance and reduced electrical load power requirements resulting in low through-life costs. The lights will meet COLREGs (international regulations for preventing collisions at sea), and will be Oxley NVG-friendly, which means they will be suitable for night operations with night vision goggles.
With decades of experience in LED innovation, Oxley is a world-renowned designer and manufacturer of rugged, reliable LED solutions. Oxley has extensive in-house design, test and manufacturing capabilities, and their experienced engineering team will adapt existing lights and technology to meet the specifications set out by Northrop Grumman.
Sales and Marketing Director for Oxley, Andy Bednarek, said: “We are delighted to have been awarded the contract by Northrop Grumman. Several years ago Oxley worked with the UK Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) War Ship Support Agency to supply an NVG-friendly LED-based upgrade for the existing navigation lighting system on the Invincible class carriers. On that project, we replaced the incandescent filaments used in the statutory lights with LED modules. This time we are engineering a state of the art set of LED NVG Friendly navigation and special operations lights suitable not only for the Queen Elizabeth class, but any other vessel greater than 50 metres in length.”
The ships, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, are being built across six ship yards in the UK with the first ship due to enter service in 2016. They will be the biggest and most powerful surface warships ever constructed for the British Royal Navy. The ships, which are over three times the size of the current Invincible class aircraft carriers, will be delivered by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, which is made up of BAE Systems, Babcock, Thales UK and the MoD. The main manufacturing contractor is BAE Systems, who began work on the project in July 2009 at its Govan yard on the Clyde in Glasgow.
Northrop Grumman is under contract from the Aircraft Carrier Alliance to supply the integrated bridge and navigation systems for the new ships. The work is being performed at the company’s UK facility in New Malden. The Royal Navy aircraft carrier contract comes hot on the heels of a recent Oxley £270k deal with Australian firm ASC Pty Ltd to supply a fully qualified LED lighting system for the Royal Australian Navy Collins-class submarine.