RFA Green Rover
1968 Rover-class tanker ship
RFA Green Rover (A268) was a Rover-class small fleet tanker of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA), built by Swan Hunter Shipbuilders on the River Tyne, UK and completed in 1969. After decommissioning in 1992 she was sold to the Indonesian Navy and renamed KRI Arun (903).
Design and construction
The Rover-class were single-hulled tankers, designed to carry a mixture of fuel oil, aviation fuel, lubricating oil and fresh water supply for services around the globe; they could also carry limited dried stores of 340 tonnes (330 long tons; 370 short tons) such as munitions and refrigerated goods. They were built with a flight deck large enough to accommodate two helicopters, although no hangar was fitted. Although not big enough to support a large task group, these ships were ideal for supporting individual warships or small groups on deployment.
The keel of Green Rover was laid at Swan Hunter Shipbuilders Ltd's Hebburn yard on the River Tyne, UK on 28 February 1968, she was launched on 19 December the same year, and completed on 15 August 1969.
Operational history
Royal Fleet Auxiliary
One of Green Rover's first duties was to attend Navy Days at Chatham, between 31 August and 1 September 1969, where she was open to the public and over 13,000 people visited the ship. In the September she towed the disabled RFA Appleleaf from the North Atlantic to HMNB Devonport.
In November 1970 she departed for a deployment to the Far East, returning by September 1971 where she carried out deck landing trials with the new Harrier jump jet while moored at Greenwich Pier on the Thames.
In 1973 she deployed nine times over three months, between 20 June and 22 September, in support of Royal Navy units operating in support of fishing boats from Britain off Iceland during the Second Cod War.
The public source identifies “RFA Green Rover” as 1968 Rover-class tanker ship. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Green, Rover and Rover-class.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4264489. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1992, 1968 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “RFA Green Rover” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.