34SQN

The mission

Formed in 1942, Canberra-based 34SQN has been tasked as the RAAF’s VIP squadron since 1959, having operated Convair 440, Vickers Viscount, BAC 1-11, HS. 748, Dassault Falcon 20 and the Falcon 900.

In 2002 the squadron converted from the Falcon 900 to two new types, the Boeing BBJ and Bombardier Challenger 604, both leased under a 13-year deal.

With its range of 6,125nm (11,350km), the long-legged BBJ spelt the end of VIP operations by 33SQN, which had undertaken overseas VIP taskings using the Boeing 707-338C.

In its 11 years with the current fleet, 34SQN has flown a variety of esteemed passengers to far-flung corners of the globe, in the process earning the RAAF’s Gloucester Cup for most proficient flying squadron. As recently as this year it also earned a Unit Commendation from the Chief of Air Force that acknowledged 34SQN’s “flawless efforts in planning, tasking and executing the provision of military aircraft support . . . during the five weeks of election campaigning”.

The passengers

Eligibility for Special Purpose (SP)flights is in accordance with guidelines laid out by the Department of Finance, with ultimate authority resting with the Prime Minister.

Three members of government are listed as approving authorities for SP flights, giving them the power to authorise their own flights aboard VIP aircraft. These are the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and the minister responsible for the department that operates the aircraft, the Minister for Defence.

The latter two are also the approving authorities for those who travel onboard 34SQN aircraft as so-called ‘entitled persons’. These are defined as cabinet ministers the leader of the Opposition, guests of the Commonwealth (such as visiting heads of state), service chiefs, parliamentary secretaries representing a minister, state governors taking up an appointment or departing office and some parliamentary committees or delegations.

Requests for SPAs are made to the VIP Operations Cell (VIPOPS) at 34SQN headquarters at Defence Establishment Fairbairn. In order to qualify for a VIP flight, applicants must indicate what alternative transport options are available, the reasons these are unsuitable and the nature and importance of the commitment.

Once a flight is approved, 34SQN swings into action, requiring the combined efforts of flightcrew, crew attendants, logisticians, caterers, administration staff and maintenance contractors.

The boss

WGCDR Phillip Trigge is the Commanding Officer of 34SQN and no stranger to mixed fleet squadrons, having started his Air Force career at 35SQN in the days when it operated the UH-1H Iroquois and DHC-4 Caribou.

Trigge succinctly states 34SQN’s mission: “We pride ourselves on being responsive to the needs of government. We’re a 365-day, 24/7

We’re good at providing an expeditious service between nonlinked hubs.

operation and one of the things we’re good at is providing an expeditious service between nonlinked hubs. For example, we can get customers from Honiara direct to Longreach, some places that are very difficult to connect through alternate transport methods. ” In general terms, the eight-seat Challenger is used for domestic taskings, while the 26-seat BBJ is used on overseas flights. But this is not a hard and fast rule, as the smaller bizjet has been used to transport VIPs as far afield as the US and Jordan, while the larger Boeing is frequently used to convey the Prime Minister between major Australian cities.

As Trigge points out, while the aircraft may occasionally fill each other’s role, aircrew are not crossqualified.

“If we were to do that, there’d be a significant training overhead and it’s not an efficient way to run a workforce.

“We have sufficient crews for five aircraft. Typically, the crew on these aircraft is pilot and co-pilot, and we have a couple of crew attendants per aircraft.

“The training burden is similar to most squadrons in the Air Force, but there’s only two squadrons in the RAAF that have crew attendants.

For ‘crewatts’, their posting tenure varies quite significantly – it can be three to six years. When we get 34SQN’s terminal at the Fairbairn Defence Establishment. tony moclair them (once trained by 33SQN in Amberley) they have their brevet and they’re then qualified on both the BBJ and Challenger. So, unlike the pilots, the crew attendants are multirole.

“Pilots have a posting tenure depending on whether they’re co-pilots or captains. Co-pilots come from 2FTS, so they’re brand new pilots. We leave them here for two, two-and-a-half years, so they then go onto another aircraft type. Captains generally stay a little longer, three or more years, depending on what the needs are for the squadron and for the wider Air Force. ” For junior pilots converting to Challenger, a blended training solution is employed that sees aircrew trained in civilian-operated simulators. For Challenger flightcrew, this means traveling to the CAE-operated simulator centre in Amsterdam.

As Trigge explained, junior pilots train on the BBJ and Challenger with a captain. Once qualified, the co-pilot returns to the squadron with a civil type rating, and must undertake a number of flights with a QFI before being cleared as a line pilot.

BBJ co-pilots, who likewise come from flight training in Pearce with hours on the PC-9/A, are trained at the Boeing Flight Training Centre in Brisbane, with initial tours at the squadron lasting between two to two-and-a-half years before transferring to other multi-engine types in the Air Force.

Trigge explained: “They are posted into the squadron and they will typically have two, three or four thousand hours as captains on other types. Once here, they’re captains under training. When they arrive, having completed simulator training and conversion course with a QFI, we use them then as copilots, but they are still treated as a captain under training. They don’t go straight into the captaincy role.

They then fly with a current captain on the aircraft type for a period of months and progress towards a squadron captaincy which, all going well, happens after they’ve done a series of checks. Then they will be a captain on that aircraft type for most of their tour at the squadron. ”

The facilitator

FLTLT Leith Roberts is the Operations Officer assigned to VIPOPS as part of the Air Mobility Division of 34SQN.

He described VIPOPS as the glue between Parliament House, ministerial offices and aircraft tasking, advising 34SQN’s customers on such things as aircraft availability, airport accessibility and flight times.

“VIPOPS is an element of ALG’s Air Mobility Co-Ordination Centre, we sit alongside them. ” Roberts explained.

“My WGCDR is the staff officer of VIPOPS and he’s got three reporting chains. One to Commander ALG, one direct to Air Mobility Divsion and one to the VIPs’ offices, specifically MINDEF’s office. And he will manage between the three of those. He also has responsibility to PMO [Prime Minister’s office] andGovernment House, providing them with advice on international tasking. ” While VIPOPS will typically assign a special-purpose mission to its Fairbairn co-tenant, 34SQN, it will, if needs dictate, task other units in the ADF to provide VIP flights, as Roberts explained.

“34SQN is a flying unit that’s ‘owned’ by ALG [Air Lift Group] and in its own right is a stand-alone unit as part of 84WG. We have a direct liaison with 34SQN and we’ll tend to directly task the squadron, but in cases where the BBJ or Challenger is not quite suitable, we might go to 32SQN or go back to Air Mobility Centre, stating ‘we need this effect, can you provide us a suitable aircraft?’ Or, we might go to CDF’s office and say ‘we need this, is there anything through the rest of the ADF?’ ” Some notable examples of this flexible approach to VIP transport have seen the Governor-General in an Army Black Hawk visiting Queensland in the wake of the 2011 floods and then Prime Minister Gillard travelling to China in April onboard a 33SQN KC-30A.

BBJ captain

FLTLT Grant Christensen is a BBJ captain and one of several QFIs at 34SQN.

Now in his seventh year in the squadron, Christensen is able to reel off an impressive list of airports and cities that his job has taken him to including Heathrow, Gatwick, Westchester, Washington, Rio, Santiago, Lima, Hawaii, Beijing, Haneda, Sapporo, Abu Dhabi, Turkey, Romania and Switzerland.

The nature of the BBJ’s mission means the aircraft is often called on often at short notice to fly to far-flung destinations unfamiliar to flightcrew. In such cases, sessions in the Brisbane simulator are scheduled to minimise risk.

“We’ll stand back and do an assessment of that. One example of that is Santiago. The crew hadn’t been there and there’s very significant terrain around the airport with complex escape procedures in terms of engine out etc. So we look at that in the planning phase and we make an assessment if we should go and practise in the sim. In that case we did.

“We get into the sim and practise our engine-out procedures and arrivals and departures to make sure we’re familiar with the basics before getting there. ” But it’s not just the approach to unfamiliar airfields that requires great attention to detail, it is also the route. As the BBJ is a state aircraft, not a civil airliner, it requires diplomatic clearance to overfly countries as it travels. A seemingly straightforward trip to Europe, for example, can require 30 such approvals that are sought through diplomatic channels by Air Force Headquarters.

An upside to being a state VIP aircraft is that 34SQN aircraft can claim ATC priority should the need arise. This is rarely invoked, but could be in order to make up time if the aircraft is running late for the all-important red carpet welcoming ceremony.

Christensen said about this unique aspect of the job: “If we have a ceremonial arrival at say, 1200,we’ll enlarge an airport diagram and we’ll look at all the options in terms of which landing runway we’re going for and which exit we can take, and we’ll look at a particular taxi speed that will take us a particular amount of time to travel the distance required.

“We’ll know where our parking spot is, the start point of our taxi, and we’ll work out taxi times and distances to arrive at the parking by one minute before doors open, because by the time you disarm the doors, get the chocks in and shut down the engines, it takes about a minute. We work backwards from that with our touchdown time at each of the thresholds, so if I takeoff at Canberra with a ceremonial arrival at Malaysia, I’ll fly the 10 hours to make that touchdown time. ”

Challenger

34SQN has 14 Challenger pilots on strength, spread between three flights.

The Challenger earns its keep as a domestic hub-buster, as explained by SQNLDR Ben Phillbrook, a pilot with 2,600 hours on the type.

“It’s noteworthy for its ability to save our customers huge amounts of time, for example Hobart to Halls Creek. There’s at least a day’s travel with multiple connections, and we do it in four hours. It’s reasonably high performance in terms of takeoff and landing so we can carry a fair bit of fuel and deploy to places with no refuelling. I think that’s one of the great strengths of it. We do some more routine taskings between two major cities. Its strength is doing flights where we skip city pairs. ” Compared to the heavier 737, the Challenger is able to utilise more airports around Australia and thus finds itself flying a greater number of sectors. This keeps the work rate high for its pilots and crew attendants, as they will often find themselves operating out of relatively austere fields where prior planning and pilot initiative come into play.

“You have to be conscious of things you might not think about when you operate from your own base, like access – how do we get the people off the airfield to their cars? The way we operate, most captains take a proactive approach to working with the aerodrome operator. Where will we park? What gate should they use? Should they use the terminal? When they come back out, will they screen? We have to think not only of what happens airside to make it a smooth experience for our passengers. ” Although the BBJs are assigned the lion’s share of overseas taskings, the Challenger can also fulfill that role. Countries within the immediate region fall within its range, making for some interesting experiences for the Challenger community.

“Normally ceremonial arrivals are for the PM or GG at a foreign port, so it’s almost always BBJ. In one I did because of an airport we needed to go to with a particular passenger, the BBJ took the passenger the bulk of distance, but the Challenger was needed for a couple of other airfields.

“The Challenger took this passenger to small airfields in the Pacific. We pulled up to the apron and it was covered with a band, so we parked on the runway centreline for five hours, red carpet rolled out onto the runway. There were palm trees, dogs and pigs running around the aircraft. This is Challenger land versus BBJ land. ”

Crew attendant

CPL Kristy Morris is a crew attendant who joined the Air Force as a direct-entry recruit. Presently, crew attendants serve only with two squadrons in the RAAF, being 33SQN in Amberley on the KC-30A and 34SQN.

As the BBJ is a state aircraft it requires diplomatic clearance to overfly countries. . .

Morris explained the training for the role that sees her fly on both types operated by 34SQN.

“We did both Qantas-based training and in-house training. We had instructors from Richmond come down and run us through service (including silver service) and emergency procedures. Most of our service procedures were issued through Qantas, which involved training at Mascot. ” As described by Morris, work on the Challenger, with its smaller passenger load, permits a more tailored service whereas the larger BBJ’s passengers are attended by up to four crewatts who are responsible to the aircraft’s cabin manager.

Understandably, given the nature of the role, 34SQN’s crew attendants must be suitably qualified before being assigned to VIP duties.

“As with all musterings in the Air Force, we get our posting orders andit’s based on, for crewatts at 34SQN, a level of flying experience and what they have previously done up in Amberley, so it’s very seniority-based and unfortunately you have to have time, you can’t push for it,” Morris explained.

Back office engine room

A vital, but often unheralded element of a squadron’s success are its administrative and logistical staff. These are especially crucial to 34SQN’s operations, which is effectively run as a small, complex charter airline.

FLTLT Graeme Lee, 34SQN’s security and logistics officer, elaborated.

“This unit is different not only because of the passengers we carry, but the way we’re supported. Security is looked after by our flexible and dedicated 34SQN security staff who do a magnificent job. For logistic support, most of the things we rely on are provided under contract or purchased from civilian vendors. So even from the way the aircraft is maintained to the people who cook our food is purchased from the civilian arena. They’re in place because of long-standing contractual arrangements.

“So my work is about ensuring those contract arrangements are in place and achieving value for money. We incur similar costs to other airlines. Catering charges, ground handling, landing fees, and as you’re aware, anything with the word ‘aviation’ in front of it is very expensive. ” With personnel on almost constant deployment, it’s the duty of SGT Vicky Brindley, orderly room sergeant and acting personnel capability officer to co-ordinate with the squadron’s Mission Support Centre to ensure accommodation for aircrew and crew attendants is booked, pay is transferred and problems sorted, no matter what A table setting on a 34SQN Challenger. tiony moclairtime of day or night.

“It’s a very high tempo, extremely demanding job,” Brindley said.

“I don’t think the wider Air Force is aware. They see that 34SQN gets to fly around the world, do the great stuff, but there is a lot of admin and logistics that go behind getting them to do what they do. ”

The future

With the lease on 34SQN’s BBJ and Challenger aircraft set to expire next year, options are currently being studied on replacement aircraft. One option under consideration is to acquire an aircraft large enough to permit the Prime Minister to travel overseas with a press contingent onboard, a limitation of the BBJ. Or the leases on the existing fleet could be extended.

But whatever aircraft types it operates, 34SQN will continue to provide the time saving air transport that keeps the wheels of government turning – with minimum fuss and maximum flexibility.

There were palm trees, dogs and pigs running around the aircraft. This is Challenger land versus BBJ land.