High tempo

For 45 years this task has been entrusted to various versions of Lockheed’s venerable P-3 Orion, which will soon be replaced by two platforms, the Boeing P-8A Poseidon and MQ-4C Triton.

With a 10-year deployment to the Middle East only recently concluded, the wing has now undertaken its first steps in a long-term transition to these new aircraft, while maintaining a brisk operational tempo at home and abroad.

Officer in charge

GPCAPT Craig Heap is the Officer Commanding 92WG and is a 30-year air force veteran with a background on HS748s, CT4s, PC-9s and helicopters.

His office is dominated by a sizeable wall map that he uses to illustrate the Wing’s activities throughout the region, from search and rescue missions in the Java sea to fisheries protection in the Pacific to monitoring ‘the steel highway’ of commercial shipping through the Straits of Malacca.

Heap explained that while the Wing’s rate of effort has declined slightly since the end of the Middle East deployment, it is still being actively tasked to support three ongoing ADF operations –Resolute, Gateway and Salania.

92WG’s detachment to Darwin comprises three aircraft with two to three crews, depending on the operational tempo.

“Resolute is a large portion of the operational focus, it’s first priority to support Border Protection Command and JOC (Joint Operational Command). It’s a large commitment in hours and personnel.

“We have a massive role identifying the people coming into Christmas Island, Cocos Island, Ashmore island and other areas, locating them, guiding surface vessels to them, making sure they’re OK in that period and moving onto the next contact. Lots of search and rescue in that area because of the profile and amount of people attempting to come to Australia,” Heap explained.

Operation Gateway, which began in 1981, sees 92WG assets regularly deploy to Butterworth, Malaysia, to conduct maritime surveillance patrols over the Northern Indian Ocean and the South China Sea as part of “an enduring contribution to the preservation of regional security and stability in South East Asia”.

“We have a bilateral agreement with Malaysia to conduct general ISR in the maritime space”, said Heap. “We look at the maritime environment, lines of communication where ships travel, checking out ships of interest, seeing who’s carrying what in international waters and at what’s occurring in a region where a large volume of the world’s maritime traffic moves through. It’s amazing seeing it on the radar. Everything lined up like a highway, all these tankers plus or minus four or five miles each side of track, all drilling along like a freeway.”

Third, Operation Solania, which is an ongoing mission to support the economic development of Pacific Island countries through the protection of fisheries and other resources. In this role, 92WG conducts maritime patrol and ISR missions in the Pacific, as Heap explained.

“The mission is to support Pacific nations with their own security and with fisheries, and to help [augment their] patrol boats. We both go out and search an area of ocean and perhaps find an illegal fishing boat that they can intercept, make arrests where appropriate, search and take them for prosecution. A lot of these countries don’t have a lot of resources and their fishing resources can be plundered. Our presence there together with the boats provides deterrence and awareness.”

While these missions are no doubt important to Australia’s interests, the AP-3C is still the master of the art for which it was acquired – anti-submarine warfare (ASW).

Though the deployment to the Middle East shifted the focus of 92WG to overland ISR, the ASW and Anti-Surface Warfare (ASuW) mission has remained as vital as ever. Heap outlined the Wing’s approach to this mission.

“ASW and ASuW are core warfighting pieces. They’re subdivided into direct support or on its own. We can chase a sub on our own and then destroy it, because diesel subs will sit in a choke point, waiting for a force to come through, so we shadow in front of a force or sanitise that area in front of the force by putting sonobuoys in and clear the area as best we can, and run around with the radar as well to degrade the sub’s ability to operate. You can do that in and around a bunch of warships, which is the hardest thing to do, especially at night or in cloud, dropping torpedos among our own ships. That’s what we practise for in major exercises like RIMPAC, Tallisman Saber and TAMEX’s, and in general fleet support with the Navy.”

A decade abroad

On March 28, 700 personnel from 92WG marched through central Adelaide to mark the conclusion of AP-3C operations in the Middle East.

Over the course of a decade, the Wing had deployed 3,500 personnel to the region to support the ADF in its prosecution of Operations Falconer, Slipper and Catalyst in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In recognition of this effort, the Wing was honoured with a Meritorious Unit Citation, gazetted on May 14 this year. Conferred by the Governor General, the MUC acknowledges 92WG ‘For sustained and outstanding warlike operational service in the Middle East of Operations from January 2003 to December 2012’.

Heap described the missions undertaken by the Orions of 10 and 11SQN, where aircrew and ground crew would deploy together as a “brick”, completing their tour together and returning home simultaneously.

“In the early 2000s, we performed counter-terrorism, working the lines out of Pakistan and down the horn of Africa. We performed overland Iraq missions and up the Arabian Gulf, protecting the oil platforms for Iraq. We then moved into doing overland operations in Afghanistan supporting the USMC and US Army doing ISR in Helmand and Kandahar,” Heap said.

After deploying to the region, he said, Australian AP-3Cs were soon in demand to provide vital intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance to coalition ground forces using the Orion’s highly capable sensors.

“When we got to Iraq they didn’t have UAVs or a lot of Predators or Reapers, so only 20 per cent of requests from land forces were being serviced. It was us, USN P-3s and RAF Nimrods doing that sort of work.”

Real-time, high-quality ISR assumed ever growing importance in the coalition’s counterinsurgency strategy during Iraq’s postwar occupation. The AP-3C was ideally suited to the task.

“We had streaming video capability, so we’d provide infrared or normal video from the EO turret. We had analysts on board to analyse the video that was coming in, then we’d have our people talking to the troops directly on the ground with our video being streamed directly to them. We’d be talking to the troops in a Humvee or at an outpost saying ‘we’ve had a look at that, or we’re on top of your vehicle that’s had an IED explosion and here’s the picture around it, there are no other people around, you’re not being ambushed’. Or we might have had a look at an area before an operation, look for the pattern of life around a village or building, or we might have directly supported a unit as it conducted an operation’.

92WG’s activities in the Middle East were not confined to just Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-piracy patrols took its AP-3Cs from Somalia to far over the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, the aircrew of 10 and 11SQNs were honing the core warfighting skills of ASW and anti-surface unit warfare, search and rescue, and long-range maritime patrol.

Though rotating aircraft and personnel to the Middle East became routine for the Wing, Heap pointed out its impact on his squadrons.

“The tempo was quite high, with people being identified for training and then we lost them to the operation for three months and then a month when they come back. After that, they were back into the cycle again.”

The upside of the 10 year long deployment in the Middle East, however, is that 92WG can draw on the deep reservoir of operational experience, accumulated by its aircrew. Heap noted there now exists a sizeable number of Airborne Electronic Analysts (AP-3C ‘backseaters’) with 10,000 flight hours to their names. Such extensive knowledge, he pointed out, will be vital to successfully introducing the AP-3C’s successor, the Boeing P-8A Poseidon, acquired under project AIR 7000.

God of the sea

A dual-phase program, AIR 7000 seeks to provide the ADF with two platforms to perform Maritime Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Response (MISRR) missions, in addition to ISR and Electronic Support (ES).

In dollar terms, Phase 1B (Multi Mission Unmanned Aircraft System) and Phase 2B (Maritime Patrol Aircraft) represent the RAAF’s second largest acquisition behind the Joint Strike Fighter. An anticipated outlay of between $4-6 billion is expected to provide eight aircraft, facilities and supporting infrastructure at RAAF Base Edinburgh and other locations, high fidelity training systems, weapons and logistics support, with an initial operating capability of the Increment 3 aircraft expected in 2017/8.

Phase 1B initially committed Australia to ‘considering and further developing options leading to the acquisition of a high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial system that can perform all-weather, surveillance and reconnaissance tasks over maritime and land environments’. In May 2013, the government showed its hand and issued a Letter of Request for Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton broad area maritime surveillance (BAMS) platform, already in early service with the US Navy.

In theory, the P-8 and Triton work together, with the Triton
providing persistent ISR and identifying, classifying, tracking and detecting surface vessels before securely passing this information to a P-8 to permit prosecution.

92WG currently has a number of personnel embedded in the P-8 program including the world’s first international instructor on Poseidon, who is currently based in Jacksonville Florida with the USN fleet replacement training squadron, VP-30.

Heap has himself had ‘stick time’ on the P-8, gained during a visit by two P-8s of the USN’s VX-1 to Western Australia for the TAMEX anti-submarine exercise in 2012. The high-time P-3 pilot commented on the Poseidon as a sub hunter.

“It’s got a nice flight management system and the autopilot manages the autothrottle to plus or minus one or two knots, which at the moment in a P-3, we have to be very good to do; it’s just like a WW2 era aircraft, using power to control airspeed at low level, when you turn and pull G as you’re going hard track on a sub, evading or getting into a contact without being found. So, [the P-8] manoeuvred well. There’ll be a few differences. The nose is about five degrees nose-up the whole time, which reduces visibility a bit.

“The key thing with the P-8 is that it’s not a 737, it’s not even off the same production line. It’s got extended range and the bigger fuselage with more fuel. It adds up to a 190,000lb, which is the heaviest 737 variant in the world, putting it in the Nimrod class. It gives it the same performance as far as going out to 1,200 miles, staying on task at low level for four hours then returning.”

Current planning calls for the retention of 10 and 11SQNs as manned squadrons sharing pooled aircraft, as is the current practice with the Orion. Training and conversion to Poseidon is expected to be conducted by 292SQN. According to Heap, state of the art simulation for flight crew and mission specialists means a significant reduction in airborne training, meaning “in a P-8, we’ll almost always be doing hard core operations or exercises.”

Ageing aircraft issues

With a demanding and continuous cycle of training, operations and exercises, maintenance personnel of 92WG have to surmount ever-growing challenges presented by the ageing AP-3C.

Essentially, 92WG is operating a mixed fleet of Orions – the 7-series procured in the late 1970s and the 6-series from the mid-1980s. Heap is confident that despite their high rate of use, his aircraft will safely make it to their planned withdrawal date.

“We’ll be very safe and apply the robust ADF airworthiness system to keep the frame and our people safe to 2019. Most of the airframes only have 14,500 to 16,500 hours on them. By contrast, the US are flying them out to 22,000 and in some cases, re-winging them.

“There’s some minor corrosion issues to do with our role over water, but it’s easy to remediate. Structurally the aircraft is very, very strong. And if we went down a path called safety by inspection, which means a couple of invasive inspections at the 14/16,000 hours mark (which means we rip panels off, look for critical points and make sure there’s no cracks), then we move on and extend the aircraft for another couple of thousand hours.”

Challenges ahead

2013 finds 92WG in a period of transition as it looks towards the introduction of the two new platforms while keeping a still supremely capable, though ageing, aircraft operational and capable of performing the myriad tasks assigned to it.

The future of the 5 Flight, which has conducted extensive operations in Afghanistan, is still to be decided as Australia begins the process of withdrawing combat forces there. Whatever happens, the Wing has at its disposal the knowledge accumulated with the operation of UAVs that will be of enormous value should the Triton be acquired as planned.

The arrival of the P-8A will mean yet more upgrading for RAAF Edinburgh, which over the last decade has seen $620 million of capital works undertaken, with the base now playing host to the Army’s 7RAR in addition to 92WG and the Aerospace Operational Support Group.

The base is set, therefore, to continue being the base to the Wing that makes a daily contribution to the protection Australia’s security.

Reflecting on the Wing’s importance to the ADF as a whole, Heap observed: “I think we provide a world-class maritime patrol and land response capability, across our mission statement which talks about being able to provide ISR and strike. People miss the strike piece, but *******we’re a serious weapon shooter********. We fire missiles, we can take out warships at extreme range from Australia and we can take down subs as well.

“We’re a serious weapon shooter. We can take out warships at extreme range from Australia…”

“So 92WG is out there still conducting operations with an older frame, that is a fantastic aircraft that’s very safe and that most importantly has saved thousands of lives in the last couple of years from SAR in the Pacific to the soldier on the ground in Urozgan.”