What makes INS Vikramaditya Indian Navy’s most potent aircraft carrier

In July this year, an old game played out in the Barents Sea — a new warship undergoing exhaustive trials by Russian shipbuilders prior to her induction, being shadowed by NATO ships keen to understand what it would be capable of.

During the several weeks that the Vikramaditya aircraft carrier underwent trials, a Norwegian NATO intelligence vessel kept company, steadily building up an electronic dossier.

For a Navy that is proud of its legacy of operating aircraft carriers, the Vikramaditya is like no other ship it has had in the fleet before. It is the Navy’s biggest ship for one — surpassing INS Viraat by 10,000 tonnes — and one of the most potent aircraft carriers in this side of the world, in fact the first ‘new’ ship of its class to be based in the Indian Ocean in over two decades.

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