Factors contributing to the cancellation of CVA-01 included inter-service rivalries,[2] the huge financial costs of the proposed carrier against ongoing budgetary constraints,[3] and the technical complexity and difficulties it would have presented in construction, operation, and maintenance.

[3] Some historians also cite the increased role played by land-based aircraft in providing a nuclear deterrent and that naval leadership at the time presented their need for the carriers poorly in government.

With the remainder of the air group, this would give a total of approximately 40 aircraft, which compared poorly to the 90 available to a Kitty Hawk-class ship.

The increasing weight and size of modern jet fighters meant that a larger deck area was required for takeoffs and landings.

Once the Chiefs of Staff had given their approval to the idea of new carriers being necessary, in January 1962 in the strategic paper COS(621)1 British Strategy in the Sixties, the Admiralty Board had to sift through six possible designs.

The largest design, based on the American Forrestal class, had space for four full-sized steam catapults but was rejected early on as being significantly too costly, particularly in terms of the dockyard upgrades that would be needed to service them.

The Treasury and the Air Ministry were pushing for a new set of long-range strike aircraft operating from a string of bases around the globe.

Four ships were planned but the addition of construction of four Polaris missile nuclear submarines (ordered in April 1963) introduced delays of ten months in expected production.

The size of the flight deck, combined with steam catapults and arrester gear would have enabled the carriers to operate the latest jets.

With the navy unwilling to alter the size of the carrier and its air group accordingly the difficulties spiraled, and the final tonnage was much more likely to be nearer 55,000 tons.

The design issues also increased, including dramatically reduced top speed, deck space, armour, and radar equipment.

One argument about the cancellation of CVA-01 states that the RAF moved Australia by 500 miles in its documents to support the air force's preferred strategy of land-based aircraft.

[12] [13] Regardless of the story's veracity, the principal reason for the cancellation was that the Defence Review Board believed adequate cover could be better provided East of Suez by RAF strike aircraft flying from bases in Australia and uninhabited islands in the Indian Ocean,[14] rather than by a small carrier fleet in the 1970s which would have still included Hermes.

At the time of the announcement, Ark Royal was beginning a reconstruction with an austere refit of radar systems, communications, partial electrical rewiring, and fittings needed to allow operation of the Phantom (despite the fact that it was a worse base for such a conversion than Eagle), and it was deemed unacceptable either to cancel the much-needed work, or to spend such a large amount of money (approx.

Eagle was decommissioned in 1972, partly due to damage inflicted in a partial grounding a year before; repairs would have probably required a minimum 18-month refit in 1972–1973 at a cost of around £40 million to operate till 1977.

The concept of the "through-deck command cruiser" was first raised in the late 1960s when it became clear that there was a good chance of the Fleet Air Arm losing fixed-wing capability.

One officer who worked on the CVA-01 believed, however, that had the United Kingdom "built two or three ships to this design, they would now [in 1999] be seen to have been the bargain of the century and they would have made the Falklands War a much less risky operation" due to greater functionality.