British queen names Royal Navy's largest warship in Scotland

The Queen Elizabeth II on Friday officially named the British Royal Navy's largest and newest warship HMS Queen Elizabeth at a ceremony at Fife's Rosyth Dockyard in eastern Scotland.

The 65,000-ton aircraft carrier marks "a new phase in our naval history," said the queen, adding that the "innovative and first class" warship, the largest ever to be built in Britain, ushered in an "exciting new era" and "will be a source of inspiration and pride for us all."

The queen pressed a button to release a bottle of whisky, instead of the traditional champagne, and the bottle smashed against the ship's hull, which reflected the role Scotland has played in the aircraft carrier's construction.

About 3,500 people involved in the design and construction of the carrier watched the celebrations, alongside dignitaries and politicians including British Prime Minister David Cameron, Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond and former British prime minister Gordon Brown.

The Red Arrows, the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, flew over the dockyard before the ship was officially named, which was followed by a procession of three generations of Royal Navy aircraft, including a historic 1950s de Havilland Sea Vixen fighter -- the last and only flying aircraft of its kind in the world.

The formal naming ceremony came five years after the first metal was cut on the vessel and 33 months after the first section entered the drydock at Rosyth to begin being put together.

Later this month, the new carrier will be floated for the first time before she embarks on sea trials for a few years and finally enters service.

The warship is as long as 25 buses and can carry 40 jets and helicopters at a time. It will have a permanent crew of almost 1,600 when it enters service in 2020. However, HMS Queen Elizabeth will sail with only helicopters onboard for its first two years of service, said the local media.

With unprecedented size of 3,000 compartments for each ship and spreading across 12 decks for a 20-minute routine journey, the HMS Queen Elizabeth and a second vessel, the under-construction HMS Prince of Wales, cost an estimated 6.2 billion pounds (10.26 billion U.S. dollars) in total.  Xinhua