A great scandale for the French

A jinxed ship shouldn't go to the Bermuda Triangle. But Edouard Guillaud, the commanding officer of the French navy's new £2.4 billion nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles-de-Gaulle, steered his craft straight into the perilous waters where so many ships and planes have disappeared.

Sure enough, there was a tremendous crash, and the Charles-de-Gaulle lurched. Navy divers discovered that one of the port propellers had broken off and sunk to the bottom of the Caribbean. Each propeller weighs 19 tonnes and costs £240,096.

The Charles-de-Gaulle then shuddered back to Toulon; French newspapers joked that they had to row it. After two years of endless, inexplicable mishaps, the carrier is in dry dock until at least April. President Jacques Chirac was to have launched it on Christmas Eve.

For the first time since the second World War, the French navy is without an active aircraft carrier. The ship's predecessor, Foch, was sold for a song to the Brazilian navy, and the Foch's retired sister ship Clemenceau is being cannibalised to mend the Charles-de-Gaulle. If the operation is successful, the new carrier will be able to make only 22 knots an hour - 10 less than the Foch.

Admiral Jean-Luc Delaunay, the chief of staff of the French navy, said the broken

propeller was "scandaleux!" The 12 navy "programme officers" who supervised the Charles-de-Gaulle's 14-year construction swore on their honour that they hadn't a whiff of propeller problems. But the CGT, a communist trade union that is strongly represented in the French armaments industry, sent a letter to the defence minister claiming that "all the authorities knew that at least one of the propellers did not fulfil the contract requirements. It had been studied by X-rays which showed bubbles and cracks."

Then, at the beginning of December, an arsonist paid a nocturnal visit to the offices in Nantes of Atlantic Industrie, which built the faulty propeller. The relevant documents were destroyed, and investigators determined a blow-torch had been used to start the fire.

The Charles-de-Gaulle will go down in history as the biggest white elephant ever built by the French military. On its maiden test voyage in January 1999, the cooling circuit pumps on the ship's nuclear reactors were found to be defective. Two months later, when the carrier was finally taken to full speed, the steering mechanism vibrated strangely until new rear rotors were installed.

Over the past year, an extra £48 million was spent to protect the crew from radiation from the nuclear reactors, replace electrical circuit boards that caught fire, repaint the landing deck (too abrasive for hi-tech planes), and lengthen the runway by 4.4 metres. It was too short for the navy's US-made Hawkeye reconnaissance aircraft. Surely the navy's engineers might have figured that one out earlier?