RFA Reliant (A131) was a helicopter support ship of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.
She was built in 1977 in Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

, at the Gdańsk Shipyard

Gdansk Shipyard

Gdańsk Shipyard is a large Polish shipyard, located in the city of Gdańsk. The yard gained international fame when Solidarity was founded there in September 1980...

, as a conventional container ship. She was taken up from the trade in 1982 for service in the Falklands War

Falklands War

The Falklands War , also called the Falklands Conflict or Falklands Crisis, was fought in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the disputed Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands...

, and was fitted with the Arapaho containerized aircraft handling system, a hangar and a flight deck. After the war, she commissioned

Ship commissioning

Ship commissioning is the act or ceremony of placing a ship in active service, and may be regarded as a particular application of the general concepts and practices of project commissioning. The term is most commonly applied to the placing of a warship in active duty with its country's military...

 into the RFA. Her first operational sortie was to the coast of Lebanon in support of the British Army in Beirut

Multinational Force in Lebanon

The Multinational Force in Lebanon was an international peacekeeping force created in 1982 and sent to Lebanon to oversee the withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization...

, eventually evacuating the same in February 1984. Upon returning to UK she proceeded to the Falklands for what was expected to be an extended deployment. However, it did not last long as the Arapaho system proved to be completely unsatisfactory for handling aircraft. She was decommissioned in 1986 and sold back into conventional merchant service.