Royal Navy Between 1990 and 1996
Coventry was the leader of the
1st Frigate Squadron. The ship received the freedom of the city of Coventry in 1988.
Romanian Navy She was purchased from the
United Kingdom by the
Romanian Navy on 14 January 2003, and renamed
Regele Ferdinand (King Ferdinand) after
Ferdinand I of Romania. The ship was handed over to
Romania on 19 August 2004, and underwent
sea trials at the same time.
Regele Ferdinand was commissioned into the Romanian Navy on 9 September 2004 with the pennant number F221, and is the current
flagship of the
Romanian Navy. There has since been some controversy over the price at which she was bought. On 22 March 2011, President of Romania
Traian Băsescu said, after a
CSAT meeting, that Romania will send the frigate
Regele Ferdinand with 205 mariners and two officers on board to enforce an arms embargo in the
Mediterranean Sea, as part of the
2011 military intervention in Libya -
Operation Unified Protector. During their run in the
NATO naval group acting on Operation Unified Protector - 2011, the frigate has traveled over and carried out around 770 specific tasks. Since entry into service of the Romanian Navy,
Regele Ferdinand has performed a series of tasks among which the most important are deployments to
Operation Active Endeavour in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010 in the Mediterranean Sea, the exercise in Bulgaria "Breeze -CertExam" 2007, 2008, the exercise "Noble Midas" in Croatia in 2007 and 2008 in Italy. In August 2014,
Regele Ferdinand sailed alongside
Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 Task Unit 2 which operated in the Black Sea as part of Exercise Sea Breeze. In July 2019, the Romanian authorities announced the selection of Naval Group and its partner Santierul Naval Constanta (SNC) for the programme to build four new Gowind multi-mission corvettes and to modernise the T22 frigates. As of 2021, Romanian authorities were working in collaboration with the Romanian to replace two of the Rolls-Royce gas turbine engines with two ST40M turbine engines designed at COMOTI. While the ship type was designed to employ both Sea Wolf and Exocet missiles, as of 2025 Romania does not possess these two types of missiles. ==Gallery==