MV Red Eagle (1996)
Isle of Wight car and passenger ferry
Red Eagle is a Raptor-class vehicle and passenger ferry operated by Red Funnel on its route from Southampton to East Cowes on the Isle of Wight. The largest of its class, Red Eagle is the current flagship for Red Funnel.
History
She entered service in 1996, the latest car ferry to enter service after Red Falcon and Red Osprey in 1994. Between October and December 2004 she underwent modifications by Remontowa in Gdańsk, Poland, in order to increase vehicle capacity by 80 and allow a greater passenger capacity. This involved the lengthening of the ship by 9.6 m (31 ft). She was the last of Red Funnel's Raptor-class ships to undergo the process. When she re-entered service in January 2005, she became the largest vessel regularly crossing the Solent, taking this title from her sister, Red Osprey. Prior to beginning her 2018 sailing season, Red Eagle underwent a refit at Southampton Marine Services that refurbished and expanded her interior spaces. Fabrication work for the new extensions was by Wight Shipyard.
Events
On 11 November 2008 she was used on an excursion to view Queen Elizabeth 2 leaving Southampton for the final time.
The public source identifies “MV Red Eagle (1996)” as isle of Wight car and passenger ferry. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Eagle, Isle and Wight.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6719977. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1994, 2004 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “MV Red Eagle (1996)” 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.