Anybody got any old troop transport ships?

Factual Questions
1

It seems to me if this volcano action has occurred a generation earlier, everyone would be home by now. We used to transport our troops using large seagoing ships. If we still had those we could help people still trapped in European airports and reopen, albeit slower, some European transatlantic commerce.

If this goes on for weeks, as it well could, whole industries/ economies could crumble. The resulting effects could be very far reaching, long lasting and difficult to reverse.

Doesn’t anybody have any such ships anymore? Isn’t there anything we could repurpose to start things moving again? Is anyone even working on it?

2

I thought I read somewhere that the British navy was going to do something along these lines.

3

Britain has leaders that care about their people.

The U.S. has military ships the same as Britain. So far, there’s been no interest in using them to help our citizens.

4

Navy to help stranded travellers

5

Stranded Britains only need a ride across the channel. There’s a lot of ships that can cover that, available to them.

American’s have aircraft carriers and war ships, but I’m not sure they have troop transports anymore which is what would be needed to get people back from across the Atlantic.

Apples and oranges, really.

6

The eruption causing these problems occurred 6 days ago. If people had boarded a ship when the eruption had taken place, they would be just about now be disembarking on the other side – or at least seeing the coast as they stood on deck. It would have been roughly the same travel time 50 or 100 years ago, so, no, the problem would not have been solved then if you had the numbers of international travellers involved that you have now: where would the extra ships have come from?

7

Not really. Both the HMS Ark Royal and the HMS Ocean mentioned in the news link are aircraft carriers* and the location from which they will be bringing folks home are Africa and Asia after the people are delivered to open airports in Spain.

The more pertinent info regarding the U.S. is, as noted, that even if we sent a couple of carriers over to bring people home, it would be a week before they got to Europe and another week before they got back. By then, the travellers could have taken trains to Spain and flown back, themselves. (And if they are in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and a number of other places, they would still need to take trains to get to the coast.)
(The Ocean is an amphibious support ship, but those are, basically, smaller aircraft carriers.)