Issue 279: Bye Pig

A Controversial Birth

The Menzies government ordered the General Dynamics F-111 ‘off the drawing board’ in October 1963, more than a year before its first flight in December 1964, as a strike bomber to replace the Canberra, and as a strategic deterrent in the face of Sukarno’s rapidly arming Indonesia,which was being supplied with modern weapons including the MiG-21 fighter and Tu-16 bomber by the USSR. The BAC TSR.2, North American A-5 Vigilante and even leased Boeing B-47s were also considered but were rejected.

The RAAF F-111 program cost was to total £45 million with a contract being signed at the Pentagon in November 1963 in the presence of US President John F Kennedy and US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The original contract specified that Australia would receive 18 F-111As and six RF-111s to be delivered from 1967, while there was provision for a further six jets to be acquired later as attrition replacements. The F-111As were soon changed to the unique-to-Australia heavier F-111C model which incorporated the stronger landing gear and extended wing span of the Strategic Air Command’s FB-111 bomber, while developmental problems with the original RF-111 saw that model cancelled in 1968 and these aircraft also switched to F-111Cs.

RAAF crews trained with their USAF counterparts on the F-111 at Cannon and Nellis AFBs. The first F-111C flew in July 1968 and was handed over in September of that year. But shortly after the RAAF handover and before any aircraft could be ferried to Australia, more troubles began to dog the program. A number of unexplained losses of early production F-111As in Vietnam and at Nellis AFB, including one in which a trainee RAAF crewman ejected, and the discovery of structural issues with the aircraft’s complex wing carry through box and other components, many of which were technologically advanced for their time, led the USAF grounding their fleet. So the RAAF’s aircraft were grounded before being put in storage pending an engineering solution to the problems being found.

The RAAF F-111 training was suspended and in time it was decided that an interim type would need to be acquired. During the grounding period, overall program costs for the F-111 rose sharply which flowed on to the RAAF’s small order, leading to the aircraft being dubbed by the media and politicians as the ‘Flying Opera House’ in reference to the Sydney Opera House which was also suffering from constructions delays and cost blowouts.
In lieu of the F-111’s eventual delivery, the RAAF took delivery of 24 leased USAF McDonnell Douglas F-4E Phantoms as interim strike aircraft in September and October 1970. One of the Phantoms was lost in an accident, and the remaining 23 were returned to the USAF between October 1972 and June 1973.

When it became clear the F-111s could finally be delivered to Australia in mid 1973, RAAF crews returned to the US to resume training on the jets. The first six aircraft were ferried to Australia and arrived at Amberley on June 1, and were followed in three further batches of six on July 27, September 28 and December 4. Fittingly, the aircraft that conducted the RAAF’s final flight in 2010, A8-125, was also the first F-111C to touch down at Amberley in 1973.

RAAF crews of 1SQN, the operational strike squadron, and the dedicated operational conversion unit, 6SQN slowly worked up the F-111, gaining valuable experience with the new jet which was vastly superior in performance, capability and complexity than anything they had ever flown before, even the interim F-4s. But the performance of the new jet and the low and fast environment to which it was best suited, combined with the complexity of many of its systems, also took its toll, and the RAAF had lost four aircraft before the end of the 70s.

The RAAF’s requirement for the reconnaissance capability left vacant by the cancelled RF-111 was finally realised in 1979 when A8-126 was the first to be converted to an RF-111C by General Dynamics in Forth Worth, while another three jets, A8-134, -143 and -146, were subsequently converted at Amberley using kits. The ‘recce jets’ were fitted with a permanent weapons bay mounted pallet which contained forward and oblique video cameras, a AN/AAD-5 infra-red linescan which recorded to video or film, a Fairchild KA-56E low altitude panoramic camera, a KA-93A4 high altitude panoramic camera, two CAI KS-87C split vertical cameras, and the capability to record the aircraft’s AN/APQ-113 attack radar display. The recce jets are distinguishable by a small curved ‘canoe’ fairing with windows under the fuselage between the nose and main gear bays.

In 1981 the RAAF activated the option for the six attrition replacement aircraft from the original contract. While two of the initial six jets that were selected failed a fatigue inspection and were returned to storage, four former USAF F-111As were accepted and delivered to the RAAF in mid 1982. All four A8-109, -112, -113 and -114, were USAF Vietnam veterans, with -109 sporting battle damage repairs from North Vietnamese AAA fire, and -113 flying the last F-111 combat mission of the war. The F-111As received the longer wingtips and heavier landing gear of the F-111Cs as they underwent servicing over the next couple of years.

A Swing Wing Success

The F-111 was designed to be a true multirole aircraft – a supersonic strike bomber for the USAF (F-111A), a strategic nuclear strike bomber for Strategic Air Command (FB-111) and a long range carrier-borne interceptor for the US Navy (F-111B), but ongoing weight issues with the F-111B meant it would never be carrier suitable, and the Navy dropped out of the program in 1967 and immediately turned its focus to the lighter and more manoeuvrable Grumman F-14A Tomcat.

The F-111 featured many revolutionary features for its time, the most obvious of which was the variable geometry ‘swing wing’ which gave it benign handling qualities at takeoff and approach speeds when in the fully forward position of a modest 26 degrees of sweep, or it could fly at more than Mach 2.5 when fully swept back to 72 degrees.

Supporting the swing wings was the large wing box, which accommodated the sweep pivots, which and was made out of revolutionary D6AC steel, while the pivot sleeves themselves were also constructed from a new titanium alloy. The F-111’s Pratt &Whitney TF30 engines were the first operational afterburning turbofans, providing economical cruise settings and high dash speeds, and the engines were matched to new design intakes which used a spike and translating cowl to regulate the airflow. The engines had multi-stage afterburners, and produced nearly 18,500lb (8.9kN) of thrust each in full afterburner.

The F-111 was also the first to feature a terrain following radar (TFR) which allowed the aircraft to fly on autopilot as low as 200ft above the ground supersonically at night or in bad weather, and follow the contours of the land. Other new systems to feature on the F-111 included the crew escape capsule which ejected the entire two-crew side-by-side cockpit rather than just individual crew seats on other fast jets, and an integrated electronic warfare suite.

At 23m in length and with a 21.3m wing span when extended, the F-111C was a big but very aerodynamic aircraft. Fully loaded, it weighed nearly 52,000kg, it could carry up to 14,500kg of external stores, and it could ferry more than 5000km without refuelling using two external drop tanks. For many years the F-111 was the fastest western combat aircraft flying, and with speeds of Mach 1.4 anecdotally seen by crews at low level, it was probably uncatchable in this environment right up to its retirement.

Sharpening The Tusks

The first major upgrade of the RAAF F-111 fleet occurred in the early 1980s with the fitting of the Pave Tack targeting pod, laser guided bombs, and the Harpoon anti-ship missile.

Up to 18 Pave Tack pods were ordered by the RAAF, and the first F-111C to be modified by General Dynamics to carry the pod and its retractable ‘cradle’ mounting in the weapons bay was A8-138 in 1983. The rest of the F-111C fleet was modified at Amberley from early 1985, work which required an interface box so the digital pod could be integrated with the analogue F-111, and changing out the navigator’s radar display for two smaller CRTs and a pod hand controller.

The pod’s installation was considered a permanent one, so the rarely used M61 internal gun was deleted from the inventory and the weapons bay carriage/ejector racks and associated wiring harnesses were removed. To coincide with the Pave Tack upgrade, the aircraft’s ageing AN/APQ-113 attack radar was upgraded to the AN/APQ-165 common to the USAF’s F-111D/F and FB-111 models.

Through its infrared aperture and laser rangefinder, Pave Tack gave F-111 crews the capability to deliver weapons such as the GBU-10 900kg and GBU-12 225kg Paveway II laser guided bombs (LGB), and the GBU-15 cruciform winged glide bomb precisely at night and in all but the worst weather conditions onto a target from near stand off ranges, rather than having to effectively overfly a target to drop dumb weapons on it.

Concurrent with the Pave Tack program, the RAAF also procured the AGM-84A Harpoon. A series of successful carriage trials were carried out on the RAAF’s instrumented F-111C A8-132, first at NAS China Lake in California in 1982, and subsequently by the RAAF’s Aircraft Research & Development Unit (ARDU) at RAAF Edinburgh. The incorporation of the Harpoon gave the RAAF its first stand-off anti-ship capability, and proved to be a key element of the F-111’s value as a strategic deterrent.

With the USAF retiring many of its analogue F-111As and upgrading its digital avionics equipped FB-111s, EF-111s and F-111D/Fs under the Pacer Strike program, the RAAF decided to follow suit under its own Project Air 5225 Avionic Upgrade Program (AUP), and in 1990 a Rockwell (later Boeing) and Hawker de Havilland teaming was selected to perform the upgrade on the 22 remaining F-111Cs and RF-111Cs.

After a drawn out definition process, work on the first aircraft, A8-132 was started at Rockwell’s Palmdale facility in California in 1992 while the rest of fleet was upgraded at Amberley over the next five years. While -132 was initially painted in a light ‘air superiority grey’ colour scheme, the AUP work on the rest of the fleet coincided with the aircraft receiving new ‘gunship grey’ colour schemes to replace the familiar green and brown camouflage worn since delivery.

The AUP process was an extensive one, comprising a further upgrade to the attack radar to the definitive APQ-169 standard common to the F-111F/G models; a new digital interface with the Pave Tack pod; a new TEAC V-250AB-R Compact Airborne VCR (CAVR) which recorded radar and Pave Tack pod imagery; and two Honeywell H423ASN-41 Ring Laser Gyro inertial units.

Other elements of the upgrade included two IBM AP-102 Mil-Std-1750A mission computers; a software programmable stores management system (SMS) common to the F/A-18A Hornet; two Honeywell multi-function displays (MFD) in the cockpit; a Rockwell Integrated Communications Navigation Identification Set (ICNIS) which interfaced the aircraft’s communications, navigation aids and IFF via a control display unit or the MFDs; the APQ-171 TFR which replaced the APQ-128; and a triple redundant digital flight control system common to that fitted to USAF Avionic Modernization Program (AMP) F-111s.

While the main goals of the AUP were to increase the reliability, efficiency and supportability of the F-111C fleet, it also produced an increase in capability through better navigation accuracy and situational awareness, as well as far lower mean time between failures (MTBF) of key components which provided better aircraft availability rates. The upgrade also provided the recce jets the means to employ the Harpoon missile and LGBs, although the LGBs required a surrogate Pave Tack equipped aircraft to provide the targeting spot.

Strategic Reach

There’s little doubt the F-111 was a key strategic asset for Australia, even in its early days when it had no precision weapons capability, but particularly so after the two major systems upgrades it underwent.

Along with the Navy’s submarines and the Army’s Special Air Service and Commando regiments, the F-111 was one of three tips of Australia’s strategic deterrent trident through the latter years of the cold war and into the 1990s. But submarines and special forces take time to be positioned – if a quick, hard reaction was required, the F-111 would have been the first asset called upon to deliver that blow.

When operating out of bases in Australia’s north or west, the F-111 could strike targets anywhere in the Indonesian archipelago, while operations from the Cocos Islands or Butterworth in Malaysia brought all of Southeast Asia, eastern India, the Philippines and southern China within reach.

The aircraft’s initial application in the 70s and early 1980s, and as was ably demonstrated in Vietnam during the Linebacker II raids of 1972/73, was to strike targets such as airfields, ports, bridges and dams, rail yards, communications nodes and other large fixed facilities using low level ingress and high speed egress as its principal means of survivability. But with the introduction of Pave Tack and precision weapons, the role evolved to that of precision strike of smaller or mobile targets using LGBs at single digit stand off distances and medium altitude, and the all-important maritime strike role with the Harpoon missile.

“Up until that point we were carrying dumb bombs which were really WW2 era weapons,” explained former Hornet pilot and current Commander of Air Combat Group (ACG), AIRCDRE Mel AIRCDRE. “To move into LGBs and the Pave Tack, which at that point in time was a very capable system, really brought us up to the next level. Having that precision strike capability certainly was I think the defining moment for the F-111. When I first started flying in the Air Force in 1985, the aircraft was at that stage nearly 20 years old, but even at that point was an iconic aircraft.

It was well known for its long range and deep strike capability. As a very young junior person just entering into the field, it always seemed important to have a long range strike aircraft. As I’ve developed my career in the Air Force, to see the F-111 continue to be upgraded, the upgrades provided us with a very capable platform.”

But the RAAF took precision strike one step further, adding close air support (CAS) to the growing list of roles of the F-111. The Australian F-111 cadre developed the tactics for the persistent support of troops on the ground against fixed and mobile enemy assets from low and medium altitudes using dumb bombs and LGBs, and these tactics were taken back to the US by exchange crews in the late 1980s where they became known as ‘plinking’, a tactic used very successfully in the 1991 Gulf War by USAF F-111E/Fs against Iraqi armour and entrenched positions, and later adopted by USAF F-15E crews.

“When the F/A-18 came in it was a very capable platform for CAS, but it was at (exercise) Kangaroo 89 I think, the F-111s were part of orange force and were a nightmare to defend against,” AIRCDRE Hupfeld related. “At one point they attained air superiority and they started, in effect an offensive air support kind of structure and circled over the top of Tindal and just plinked away at the base. B-1s are doing that today and that’s a strategic system, but the F-111 did the same nearly 20 years earlier, it could carry a lot of bombs, had a lot of endurance, had the range to get where you needed to get it, and it had the Pave Tack and the system on board to get situational awareness and deliver precision weapons clinically right where they were needed.”

The RAAF also explored the use of the Pave Tack pod as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) tool, being able to see features on the ground at night and in bad weather and recording these for analysis, rather than just purely as a targeting pod. Again, these tactics were reportedly adopted by USAF F-111F squadrons based in the UK and were used to great effect in Iraq.

“What the RAAF does very well is plays to the strengths of the systems that we have, and with the F-111 that’s exactly what we’ve always done,” added AIRCDRE Hupfeld. “In 1998 was about the point where I started to become a bit more aware of some of the strategic and operational elements of our Air Force, and at that time the F-111s presented as very much an excellent capability.”

The speed capability of the F-111 was also something not to be underestimated. “When you’ve got a very high speed target, and then they check away at 30 degrees, that really creates a kinematic challenge for a missile, so you’ve really got to be in that very small window to get that missile launched,” said AIRCDRE Hupfeld. “We looked at this when we went to the Gulf in 2003 – we did intercept training in case we came up against the Iraqi MiG-25 Foxbat, so we trained against the F-111. They came over high at Mach 2 plus – they were really motoring! If you didn’t get your geometry right and detect them early, you could forget about employing ordnance against them.” As CO of 75SQN, then WGCDR Hupfeld led the RAAF’s deployment to the Gulf.

The F-111’s advanced integrated electronic warfare kit suffered from a lack of reliability and the levels of automation that it promised were never realised. “One of the big deficiencies for the F-111 initially was the RWR (radar warning receiver),” AIRCDRE Hupfeld added. “Certainly for them against an air threat, they would rely on using their radar in an air-to-air mode to try to detect air threats, or rely on ground control intercept (GCI), or just do pre-emptive manoeuvres and assume they were always targeted.

But once we put a decent RWR on the aircraft, I think with AUP (the mid 90s avionics upgrade program), certainly in the later years when we were exercising against each other, it was very difficult to target an F-111.”

Adding To The Litter

While the AUP program was getting underway in 1992, the then Keating Labor government made an announcement that 15 F-111Gs would be acquired from USAF stocks in order to spread the training burden across a larger fleet and thus extend the life of type of the F-111Cs.

The F-111Gs were all former Strategic Air Command FB-111s which had been converted for tactical duties. The F-111G conversion was conducted in the late 1980s, and included being put through the Pace Strike digital avionics upgrade program, the removal of the FB-111’s nuclear weapons capability and celestial navigation equipment, and other more subtle changes.

Of the 15 aircraft, A8-272 was taken from storage at the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Centre (AMARC) boneyard in Arizona and was appropriately nicknamed the ‘Boneyard Wrangler’ in RAAF service, while the remaining 14 came straight from USAF active units based at Cannon AFB in New Mexico.

The F-111G featured more powerful TF30-P-107 engines and more advanced intakes, had a different mission computer, and was not fitted with the Pave Tack pod. The Pacer Strike F-111Gs featured the same TFR and cockpit MFDs, and similar instrumentation as the post AUP F-111Cs, while the AUP digital flight control system was fitted to the RAAF’s F-111Gs after they arrived in Australia.

Of the 15 F-111Gs, no more than seven were ever operational at any one time, and several never flew again after arriving in Australia, instead being cannibalised for spares from day one. To coincide with the F-111G acquisition, the RAAF also reserved a further 11 F-111A/F/G airframes that were in storage at AMARC as future sources of spares, acquired additional wing sets from other boneyard F-111s which were slated to be broken up, and a large number of spare engines and other components vital to sustaining the F-111 locally.

In 1994 the DSTO commenced a study aimed at extending the life of the F-111’s engines, looking in particular at the combustion chambers which had been warping and cracking. The result was a re-engining of the R/F-111C fleet with 21,000lb thrust (10.9kN) TF30-P-109RA engines taken from retired USAF F-111Ds and EF-111As. At the same time, the F-111Gs received an engine upgrade to as common a standard as possible with the C models, and their P-107 engines were swapped out for a hybrid configuration utilising the -109RA engine and the -P107’s tailpipe, and were redesignated as TF30-P-108s.

Also in the 1990s, the RAAF acquired a retired USAF F-111F simulator, and it was converted to an F-111C AUP configuration by Wormald Australia before being installed at Amberley in 1996.

In the meantime, a follow-on upgrade program to AUP was devised in the wake of the USAF’s final F-111 retirement so the RAAF’s aircraft could be better self sustained. The Block Upgrade Program (BUP) was an ongoing roadmap to address obsolescence and supportability issues, with the Air 5225 AUP comprising the first stage (C-1) of this effort. Block Upgrade C-2 addressed the F-111C’s EW suite, and saw the installation of an ALE-40 countermeasures dispenser (CMDS) and an interim ALR-62(V)6/7 radar warning receiver (RWR), while Block Upgrade C-2A was to have seen the fleet fitted with the BAE Systems ALR-2002 RWR under Project Air 5416, an effort which was ultimately cancelled despite reported promising trial results.

Block C-3 saw the addition of the AN/ALE-47 digital CMDS, a digital AN/ALQ-213 EW management unit, a voice and data recorder, and a digital flight control system upgrade, while Block C-3A comprised the integration of the Elta EL/T-8222 jammer pod which was usually carried on the centreline pylon between the aircraft’s rear ventral strakes. Interestingly, anecdotal reports suggest the USAF took great interest in the 8222 pod when the RAAF first deployed F-111s equipped with it to a Red Flag exercise in 2006, so much so that it acquired some for its own aggressor squadrons for dissimilar air combat training.

The Block C-4 upgrade gave the F-111C the ability to carry and employ the 1500kg AGM-142 Raptor air-to-surface missile being acquired under Project Air 5398 and its separate datalink pod, as well as providing the necessary supporting hardware for GPS guided weapons such as JASSM and JDAM which were intended to be integrated under Block Upgrade C-5 along with SATCOM, but apart from bench testing at Amberley which reportedly showed much promise, no further phases of the BUP were conducted following the 2004 decision to retire the aircraft by 2010.

Retirement

The decision to retire the F-111 in 2010 was taken in 2004 after the Howard government’s commitment to the JSF program, and the perceived cost and supportability risks to the F-111.

The decision also followed two grounding periods, the first being the result of an outboard section wing failure during cold proof fatigue testing in early 2002, followed that June by a fuel tank explosion on former F-111A A8-112 caused by a cable harness arcing which blew a hole in the weapons bay roof just behind the cockpit and resulted in the near loss of the aircraft near Darwin. Both of these incidents, rightly or wrongly, contributed to the perception that there was an increased risk of losing aircraft as the fleet aged further, despite the excellent upgrade and preparatory work done by the DSTO, the RAAF and Boeing under the AUP/BUP programs, and the increasingly impressive availability the fleet was beginning to demonstrate following their return to flight.

The range at which the F-111 could strike targets was also called into question, with an increasing requirement for Hornets to escort the strike jet in medium to high threat environments. “As air threats increased in the modern environment, then the range limit for the F-111 became the range limit for the fighter,” said AIRCDRE Hupfeld. “We obviously had a few 707 tankers which came into play to extend the range of the Hornet, but they couldn’t refuel the F-111, but at least it allowed us to pair up and still do strike missions together. In the early days the F-111s and Hornets did some really great work together. In particular 1SQN and 75SQN worked very closely together, and they did what they called conjoined ops, specific activities to support strike where F/A-18 escorted F-111.”

At the time of the retirement announcement, then Chief of Air Force AIRMSHL Angus Houston said the withdrawal of the F-111C would depend on several other key capability elements being in place first; these being the successful completion of the Air 5376 classic Hornet Upgrade program (HUG), the AGM-158 JASSM stand off missile having entered service on the F/A-18A/B and AP-3C Orion fleets, and the service introduction of the Wedgetail AEW&C and the Airbus KC-30 MRTT air refuelling tanker.

But more than six years later and with the F-111s now gone, few of these capabilities are in place, let alone operational. While most of the upgrades on the classic Hornets have been completed, the Phase 2.3 EW, and Phases 3.2 and Phase 4 structural refurbishment elements of the HUG program are ongoing. Similarly, the Air 5418 effort to integrate the JASSM to the F/A-18A/B is running about 18 months late and is unlikely to be declared operational before the end of 2011, while the plan to employ it from the AP-3C was abandoned several years ago. The Wedgetail program has now seen four aircraft delivered in an initial configuration and crew training is well underway, but further upgrades are required before IOC can be declared in late 2011, while the first of five KC-30A tankers is expected to be delivered “by the end of 2010” with IOC also not expected before late 2011.

Instead, the F-111’s retirement has been made possible by the acquisition of 24 Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornets ‘Rhinos’ have been acquired as a Bridging Air Combat Capability (BACC) to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Indeed many parallels can be drawn between the F-111 acquisition and service entry, and the position Australia finds itself in today with its planned next combat aircraft, the F-35. The F-111 was plagued with technical difficulties at the start of its life, and ended up entering service five years later than planned. While it’s premature to say the F-35 has been similarly plagued, its development has been partly hindered by some technical issues, but the F-35’s biggest hindrance appears to be the incredibly short-sighted US budgetary, acquisition, test and evaluation, and political processes which just weren’t there during the heady days of the Cold and Vietnam wars when the F-111 was born.

Because of the F-111’s delays, it became necessary to introduce 24 interim strike aircraft in the Phantom, and many felt at the time the Phantoms should have been retained after the F-111s finally arrived as risk mitigation and to bolster the RAAF’s strike capability further. Similarly, the 24 ‘Rhinos’ were acquired as a bridge to the F-35 to hedge against possible delays, and some commentators are also calling for them to be retained well after the F-35 has entered service instead of keeping them just for the decade or so they are intended to be in service.

While the Rhinos acquired under Air 5349 allowed the retirement of the F-111, despite the similar number of aircraft and the fact they are based at Amberley with 1 and 6SQNs, they’re were not intended as a direct replacement of the F-111’s capabilities. Certainly the RAAF has very quickly embraced the Super Hornet purchase as being far more than just filling Amberley’s ‘carports’ with a direct replacement or interim strike aircraft, instead using the opportunity offered by the Rhino’s advanced sensors, datalinks, low observability and other features, as well as the security and compartmentalisation that comes with operating such advanced systems, as a stepping stone from the third generation F-111 and fourth generation classic Hornets, to the next generation F-35.

“The withdrawal of the F-111 is expected in 2010 with the F/A-18F Super Hornets to be operational that same year,” then Defence Minister Dr Brendan Nelson said in formally announcing the Super Hornet acquisition in March 2007. “There is no gap in Australia’s air combat capability and the Government is taking all necessary steps to ensure a gap does not emerge.

Said Dr Nelson, “The F-111 has been a stalwart aircraft at the centre of Australia’s strike capability for over three decades. The Chief of Air Force, Air Marshal Geoff Shepherd, a pilot with around 2500 hours flying F-111’s, said it is important for Australia to retire the F-111 at a time of our choosing. This ensures that the men and women who operate them are not endangered through the risks of an aging platform.”

Interestingly, at the time of the Super Hornet announcement, Australia expected to receive its first F-35 in 2013. This now stands at early 2015. “Australia remains fully committed to the JSF,” Nelson said. “But the government is not prepared to accept any risk to air combat and strike capability during the transition to the JSF.”

The RAAF never intended to operate the Super Hornet in the same way it has operated the F-111 – the Rhino can’t hope to match the speed, the endurance, nor the uplift of the Pig. But with the Rhino’s modern sensors headed by the extraordinary APG-79 AESA radar, the fusion of data from these sensors, its comprehensive communications and datalink suite, its manoeuvrability and low observability, and the user-friendly human machine interface (HMI) of the decoupled cockpit environment, what the F/A-18F lacks in speed and range, it more than makes up for in situational awareness for both its crews and those of classic Hornets and other platforms via datalinks, and the ability to put multiple precision weapons onto targets while simultaneously defending itself against air and ground threats. The F-35 will be operated in much the same way.

“The [upgraded] classic Hornets and Super Hornet certainly represents capability that is far more relevant to the current fight than the F-111 is, and that to me is a fairly clear indication that it is the right time to be retiring this asset,” AIRCDRE Hupfeld said. “It’s been a tremendous workhorse right up to the middle of this past decade, and a relevant capability in our region. But if we wanted to do it in a coalition sense and integrate it with the four and a half to fifth gen fighters that are coming out now, it’s outside its area.”

Wind Down

The wind down process for the F-111 fleet started when the remaining F-111Gs were retired in 2007, the final sortie being flown on September 3 by then Chief of Air Force (CAF) and former F-111 pilot, AIRMSHL Geoff Shepherd.

The Gs were parked nose to tail alongside the Air Movements ramp at Amberley and were stripped of all equipment common to the F-111Cs. One of the aircraft, the ‘Boneyard Wrangler’ A8-272, was placed in controlled storage in preparation for it to be trucked to the RAAF Museum at Point Cook, a trip it undertook in 2009.

The final R/F-111C pilot’s course was completed in August 2008 with five crews graduating following the completion of the graduation exercise, Northern Challenge at RAAF Townsville. Also in August 2008, 1SQN’s maintenance personnel moved across to 6SQN, and then 1SQN relinquished all of its F-111s and aircrew to the new super-sized 6SQN in November of that year so it could begin its restructure in preparation to become the first Super Hornet operating unit.

“I had quite a big squadron there for the best part of a year with over 500 people, so effectively it was a ‘double of everything’ squadron,” the CO of 6SQN at the time of the F-111’s retirement, WGCDR Michael ‘Micka’ Gray told AA. “I had all the air crew, all the aircraft and well over 500 people, and we were operating out of our own buildings and the old 1SQN buildings. We had that for almost a year until we started to draw maintenance personnel and aircrews off to the first Super Hornet training courses. But as we drew down the people, we also drew down the facilities, and we got back to a normal squadron size in time for the old 1SQN building to be demolished.”

WGCDR Gray added that, despite the two squadrons’ roles, 1SQN being the operational unit and 6SQN being the conversion unit, there were few cultural challenges that couldn’t be overcome.

“Any organisation that has longevity always develops its own cultural identity. While the end result was always to get aircraft airborne, effectively 6SQN was the training squadron and 1SQN was the operational squadron, so we had different needs. 1SQN deployed a lot more and was away a lot more, while 6SQN was busy putting air crew through courses. So just by their nature, there was a healthy rivalry between the two squadrons.”

But 6SQN didn’t just sit back and let the F-111 capability wind down, with the unit participating in Pitch Black in July and other smaller exercises right up to the end. The unit even got to exercise with the Super Hornets as 1SQN got its new mounts up to speed.

“It’s been excellent having the Super Hornet flying from Amberley while we were still flying,” WGCDR Gray explained. “And a lot of that has been at night working with and against the Super Hornets. We were sort of flexing out together, working out if you like, and the whole base had a great vibe going. The technicians loved hearing about what we were doing, the air crew were working with the aircraft they’ll go on to, and the Super Hornets certainly benefitted from our presentations against them.

They’ve got some very experienced Hornet guys from the classic, and they’ve also got new guys who are ex-F-111, but also some junior guys who haven’t flown either coming through, so they’ve got a good mix of crews. The Super Hornets are doing everything from simple 1v1 sorties or 2vX sorties, and they were either just against the F-111, or against F-111s escorted by Super Hornets.”

While many F-111 people have or will go to Super Hornet, that aircraft’s lower maintenance requirement means a smaller workforce will be required to support it, so many have transferred to other aircraft types such as the C-17, the imminent KC-30A tankers, the Wedgetail AEW&C at Williamtown, or even to C-130s at Richmond. Fortunately, due to the intensive planning that has gone into the F-111’s drawdown and the Super Hornets introduction, almost all the uniformed F-111 workforce has been able to be accommodated within the normal posting or retirement cycle process.

WGCDR Gray was quick to point out that the F-111 remained strategically relevant to Australia right up to its withdrawal, and was proud to have been able to launch a six-ship for the farewell flights on December 3. “Obviously, government’s requirements have been factored in as we draw down and in terms of the crews, and there’s been an acknowledgement and a practical review of what we had available,” he said. “But I’ve been very comfortable with that in terms of the number of crews and the number of aircraft capability. We had some crews who were already transitioning across to the Super Hornet, and we had some people who were still F-111 rated while being on Super Hornets. But we haven’t had to artificially extend people, which has been great.”

“Right to the end the F-111 brought a range of options to government.”

Legacy

That the RAAF’s F-111s were never used in anger was probably the ultimate legacy of the deterrence value of the aircraft. The only ‘operational’ use of the F-111C, the over flights by recce jet RF-111Cs of East Timor during the heady days of the INTERFET intervention there in 1999, perhaps also demonstrated to Indonesia that escalation of that situation may not have been in their best interests.

There was also some thought of taking the F-111 to Iraq in 2003. “In 2003 what they really needed was some CAP (combat air patrol), and we provided that need for them,” said AIRCDRE Hupfeld. “To later have the ability, once we had air superiority, to be able to roll into a strike or offensive air support role meant the Hornet was quite versatile. To be able to sit on CAP with a bomb on the wing which we could deliver against a high value target if there was a time sensitive call that came, meant that the F/A-18 provided the type of capability that was of most use to the coalition at that stage.”

“We’ve never used it in anger other than Timor which was more of a peacekeeping activity,” said AIRCDRE Hupfeld. “But even then it was used to great effect, both to provide some real ISR product, but also to demonstrate the capability Australia had. But in terms of the high end warfare that we all train for, but never having to use the jet in anger in that environment, the only way we can judge its performance is on international exercises such as Red Flag.

The F-111 was involved in Red Flag for many years and always performed at a very high level. And we know we could have rocked up to an exercise right on the eve of its retirement, and it would still have been very capable and it would still have been able to meet the requirements we’d set for it and the tasks government might have wanted it to perform.”