SAINT-NAZAIRE (France), Dec 22: The Queen Mary 2, the world’s biggest passenger liner, was given a low-key sendoff on Monday as it left its French shipyard, just five weeks after 15 people died in an accident during the final days of its fit-out.
The 345-metre long vessel, which was built over the last two years at a cost of 640 million euros (800 million dollars), was pulled out to sea by tug-boat while tens of thousands of people bade farewell from the shore.
A British maritime flag flew from its deck for the first time, following a handing-over ceremony earlier in the day during which its owner, Cunard, officially took possession of its new flagship to the sound of an orchestra playing the French and British national anthems.
After a brief journey to Spain, to get the crew accustomed to navigating its 150,000-ton bulk, the QM2 will head to its home port of Southampton in southern England, where Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II will formally name it in a ceremony on Jan 8.
It will then leave on its maiden voyage, to Florida in the United States, with passengers paying from 1,300 to more than 30,000 euros for their cabins and access to the top-of-the-range features, including a 1,000-seat theatre, a ballroom and five swimming pools.
Initial plans had called for a more exuberant send-off, but that was toned down after a November 15 accident in which 15 people — many of them relatives of the workers who built the ship — died during a guided tour when a gangway collapsed.
Another 30 people were injured in the incident, which sent the group plunging 20 metres to the ground of the dry-dock.
Built by the French engineering group Alstom to replace the aging Queen Elizabeth 2 as the pride of Cunard’s cruise-ship fleet, the QM2 aims to provide the ultimate in commercial seagoing luxury.
Able to accommodate 2,620 passengers and 1,253 crew, it contains a planetarium, a virtual-reality golf drive, a kennel for pampered pets, a casino, several bars and restaurants, a gym and artwork estimated at four million euros (five million dollars).
Cunard, a British subsidiary of the US group Carnival Corporation, boasts that the vessel is “the largest, longest, tallest, greatest, widest, and grandest ocean liner in the world.”
It is about 10 metres longer than the United States’ biggest aircraft carrier, and nearly a quarter longer than the Titanic, the ill-fated cruiseship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1912 after being launched as the biggest luxury liner of its time.
The ship is called the Queen Mary 2 with the number 2 rather than the Roman numerals II because it refers to a ship and not the monarch, Cunard points out, adding that the liner is taking to the ocean nearly seven decades after its transatlantic predecessor, the Queen Mary, first entered service.
The completion of the QM2 in just two years is seen as a moment of pride for the people of Saint-Nazaire, a town that was transformed only 150 years ago from a fishing village into France’s biggest shipyard. —AFP