Unseen, Unheard…

Heron ops

The RAAF currently has three Heron airframes deployed to Afghanistan operating from Kandahar Airfield (KAF), the world’s busiest single-runway airport. The platforms themselves are leased from Canadian firm MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), which in turn leases them from the original manufacturer, Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI). All maintenance is completed by MDA staff, comprising both Canadian and Australian personnel, many of whom are ex-military.

The close relationship between operators and maintainers intheatre has led to a 100 per cent mission success rate for the Heron detachment.

The Heron detachment’s mission is to fly in support of Combined Team Uruzgan (CTU) and the special operations task group, Task Force 66 (TF66).

In Afghanistan, the Heron is able to sit at medium altitude, unseen and unheard by human senses, where it can bring to bear its full spectrum ISR package, helping to complete the intelligence picture and adding to overall situational awareness. The ability to watch targets day after day helps form ‘patterns of life’, allowing for a greater understanding of what is going on at any one time and lowering risk to the operators on the ground.

Capability

With a 16m wing span and a 1,150kg maximum takeoff weight, the Heron is a not insubstantial airframe.

Coupled with the four-cylinder Rotax 914 turbocharged piston engine – the same engine that powers the infamous Predator – the Heron is capable of flying at 30,000ft for 25 hours at an average speed of 65kt.

In Afghanistan, however, the UAV mainly operates between 16,000 and 24,000ft.

Its significant ISR package includes electro-optics and infrared sensors as well as a highly specialised and classified EW system.

A line-of-sight datalink connects the Heron air vehicle with a ground control tower (GCT) at Kandahar, which in turn is linked to a ground control station (GCS). The system currently in use in Afghanistan is easily capable of more than double the 110km range needed to cover operations over Uruzgan Province.

The Heron’s remarkable level of automation includes automatic takeoff and landing. The Heron will taxi to the runway under the remote control of its pilot, but once cleared the pilot presses a takeoff button and the UAV will autonomously take off. The same is true in reverse for landing.

In the event of a loss of contact between the air vehicle and the GCS, the Heron has a ‘return home’ mode that would see it follow a preprogrammed route back to a holding point six kilometres outside the airfield. There the Heron would continue to circle until reaching minimum fuel point, around 40 litres, and finally landing automatically.

In the event of an engine failure, the Heron is capable of gliding home 70 to 80km and has preprogrammed emergency landing sites for when it is unable to return to KAF. A third level of redundancy has an IR receiver on the Heron’s wing to communicate with a corresponding sensor on the runway.

Any type of flying in Afghanistan will enhance the skill-set of pilots. . .

Operators

Operated from the GCS, the Herons are flown by qualified pilots who come from a full range of ADF fixed and rotary-wing platform backgrounds. A pilot is responsible for flying the Heron while a copilot acts as a sensor payload operator.

“Pilots are aviators, not platformspecific operators,” WGCDR Steve Parsons, commanding officer of Heron Rotation 12 said. “Theycome from a range of backgrounds – C-130, F-111, King Air – everything from fast air to cargo. Pilots must adapt to the Heron as with any other type. ” There are now more than 150 qualified UAV pilots in Australian service, meaning a solid core of well-trained and experienced operators for any future ADF UAV acquisitions.

In this sense, Heron has not only been an endeavour in providing combat service support and ISR to troops on the ground in Afghanistan, but it has been an important learning opportunity for the ADF.

“It has been important that Heron is unarmed,” Parsons said, “because it allowed us to focus solely on learning how to fly the Heron in an ISR capacity. When you fly an armed aircraft, your whole aim is to get a firing solution.

“In the case of Heron, we were able to spend 20,000 hours learning firstly how best to operate it and secondly how best to employ the ISR capability in support of troops,” he said. “If the ADF eventually seeks to acquire and operate an armed UAV, it will be from a solid foundation of operating UAVs with a broader scope than simply finding the firing solution. ” But the effect for operators has also been beneficial, Parsons said.

“Any type of flying in Afghanistan will enhance the skill-set of pilots when they return to their home units. For example, fighter pilots learn a better understanding of ISR. All pilots gain a broader understanding of the battlespace, such as working more closely with ground troops,” he said.

But the Heron system is more than a UAV and its two pilots. In a larger, segregated compartment near to the GCS sits the ground mission station (GMS), occupied by a range of specialists including geospatial analysts and intelligence liaison officers. Analysts in the GMS assess the data the Heron takes in while liaison officers tailor the product to the consumers – operational troops.

The segregation, known as a ‘sterile cockpit’, serves to maintain operators in the mindset of flying. All the while, the GMS and GCS maintain contact by radio and chat services.

Maintenance

The Heron is arguably one of the key examples of the benefits that come from deep-rooted Defenceindustry partnerships. Because of the rapid acquisition nature of Project Nankeen, MDA’s operational support of the Heron on the Kandahar flightline has meant the RAAF can focus on what it needed to learn, rather than troubleshooting.

MDA takes the aircraft as it taxis in, shuts it down and performs required maintenance before handing it back ready to taxi out again for the next mission. MDA must ensure availability when required for the RAAF operations.

Because of the relative simplicity of the mechanical elements of the platform, such as the four-cylinder powerplant, the Heron requires only a minimal maintenance footprint.

Fourteen maintainers support the three-aircraft Australian Heron detachment with its 600 to 700 flying hours per month

. . . . bird’s-eye images can be sent to a field laptop. . . or even projected via retinal display onto a ground troop’s eyeball.

Those simple maintenance requirements see a filter change every 30 or so hours and deep maintenance every 900 hours, where the engine is completely changed out, a process which takes only 24 hours.

Like most UAVs, the combination of cheap flight hours and simple maintenance requirements makes the Heron phenomenally cheap to operate, especially compared to manned platforms like Australia’s AP-3C Orions.

The Heron’s main limitation is the impact of bad weather, which can cause problems for the platform.

But because of its range and endurance, the Heron can remain in a loiter mode while waiting for bad weather to pass and return on-station afterwards, allowing a mission to be somewhat salvaged.

Another limiting factor can be crew endurance and duty hours.

When Heron operations cease, the airframe can be packed into a single container and flown home in a C-17, as can the GCS stations.

Shadow ops

The AAI RQ-7B Shadow 200 Tactical Unmanned Aerial System(TUAS) is the newest addition to Australia’s growing UAV family.

Introduced to operational service in August 2011, ahead of schedule, Shadow was acquired through the US Foreign Military Sales office.

“The units we have are the same as those sold by the US military.

The benefit of that is the direct link we have into US developments for the platform,” MAJ David Klomp, Shadow detachment commander in Tarin Kot from 20th Surveillance and Target Acquisition Regiment, said.

In a little over 18 months in-theatre across four detachments, Shadow clocked up over 10,000 operational hours in support of Australian and Coalition troops on the ground, across the spectrum of ISR and target acquisition missions, a milestone reached on September 22 2013.

In contrast to the larger Heron, Shadow’s CONOPS are not entirely designed to be clandestine. The Shadow’s Wankel rotary engine is not what one would call ‘subtle’, instead sounding like an angry lawnmower, which has had some effect as a deterrent.

“We’ve found that sometimes it can be just as effective for the insurgents to know you are there. If they know they’re being watched, they’re less likely to go out and plant a bomb or something equally as nefarious,” Klomp said.

Capability

The Shadow 200 acquisition arose from Joint Project (JP) 129 Phase 2 for the Army’s Tactical Unmanned Aerial System (TUAS) requirement at a total cost of around $175 million.

The air vehicle itself has a total ‘wet’ weight of less than 200kg and a wing span of 6. 2m. The Wankel rotary engine produces 38hp (28kW), allowing the Shadow to fly at a cruise speed of around 75kt, the most stable speed to meet mission parameters, though notably not for maximum efficiency. Endurancecurrently runs at between five and six hours, though a recently approved extended wing variant can get closer to nine hours.

The Shadow carries the 20kg POP300D ‘Designator’ multi-sensor electro-optical payload. The package combines a thermal imager, colour CCD with near IR capability, a laser pointer, laser rangefinder and laser designator compatible with US and NATO laser-guided munitions.

Shadow also has a communication relay capability allowing for the retransmission of VHF radio signals.

Much like a racing motorcycle, Shadow has an external, removable starter motor to turn over the engine. The launch is via a selfcontained trailer-borne catapult, which uses pneumatic pressure to speed the UAV from zero to 70kt in only 15 metres.

Like the Heron, the Shadow operator will undertake normal air traffic checks prior to takeoff, as well as conducting comprehensive checklists for air vehicle and sensor package operation and redundancy.

Landings are guided by the Tactical Automatic Landing System (TALS), consisting of a groundbased micro-millimeter wavelength radar and an aircraft-borne transponder. From the air vehicle’s landing ‘hold point’, the TALS will search for Shadow and line up the UAV on an automated approach, following the air vehicle all the way to touchdown.

Once grounded, Shadow’s tailhook catches an arresting wire connected to brake drums while a net is provided beyond that in case Shadow misses the wires. Due to the vehicle’s lightness and the potential for strong winds on TK’s runway, it’s not unheard of for a strong gust of wind to push a Shadow up and over the wires.

In the case of a loss of contact, the Shadow would automatically return to the point of hold, via an overhead fly-by of TK, then to a designated safe point where it will turn over and deploy it’s parachute, making recovery easy and protecting the valuable sensor payload from impact.

Shadow is operated from a ground control station (GCS) ‘cockpit’ by an air vehicle operator and a sensor payload operator. The GCS itself is the same system used by ‘warrior alpha’ UAS, including the Predator and Reaper systems, with only minor changes. Built on a Humvee chassis and transported by Unimog, the GCS connects to the Shawdow via a C-Band line-of-sight directional antenna datalink, which has a range of 120km.

Australian Shadow operations consisted of four air vehicles that were cycled through operations and maintenance, but were capable of running operations for 24 hours a day. In fact the final detachment, which commenced in early May, had by October already flown 3,500 hours, surpassing the previous crew’s eight months worth of hoursin half that time. In reality, the four air vehicles allowed for the detachment to simultaneously run two missions.

The Shadow and it’s crew obtain the raw data for assessment by image analysts who produce intelligence products. From the GMS, those bird’s-eye images can be sent to a field laptop or toughbook, or even projected via retinal display onto a ground troop’s eyeball. For analysts, the system also has full motion video and images with a ‘Tevo-like’ recording capability.

Operators

In Afghanistan the Shadow was operated by gunners from the 131st Surveillance and Target Acquisition Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery, along with maintainers from the Royal Australian Navy and image analysts from the 1st Topographical Survey Squadron.

Among the many camouflaged personnel at MNB-TK, the Navy maintainers stood out for their significantly overgrown beards. RAN members joined the deployment in May 2014 under the broad objective of learning lessons for the future use of UAVs at sea, and had integrated very successfully in the operation, Klomp said.

The RAN and its Chief VADM Ray Griggs have previously expressed desires to integrate unmanned platforms on naval vessels by 2020. It is believed the RAN is interested in using unmanned platforms on its forthcoming Canberra class LHD amphibious ships in particular.

So embedding Navy maintainers with the Shadow operators offers exposure to the small footprint required for launch and recovery and ease of maintenance for small UAV systems.

Unlike Heron, the Shadow’s air vehicle operator and sensor payload operator are not qualified pilots.

Rather, they are highly trained multirole operators “with enough knowledge to pass the [General Flying Progress Test] very quickly,” noted Klomp.

“Most of our operators have qualified at an entry level higher than F-18 pilots,” Klomp said.

“They’re committed, resilient, fast learners and they do one hell of a job. The ‘Xbox generation’ is born for this. ” At the time of Australian Aviation’s visit to Tarin Kot, there were 45-odd personnel involved in the Shadow deployment, but with the last Shadow mission flown in October all Shadow personnel were due home in Australia by the end of November.

Maintenance

If Heron is considered simple to maintain, then Shadow is even simpler. Following landing, the UAV is wheeled to the maintenance shed, checked, fixed and returned to the flightline. General servicing occurs after every mission, and takes around 30 minutes to refuel, inspect and ready the airframe for the next sortie. As the Shadow is a highly modularised system replacement of faulty or worn components is relatively simple.

“As with anything over here, the environment is very harsh, and rotary engines produce large amounts of power for very short periods of time, even under the best of circumstances,” Klomp explained. In fact, the Wankel rotary engine is so powerful the aircraft was not adversely effected by TK’s 4,300ft altitude. Still, engine changes constituted the most common maintenance requirements for Shadow, every five to six hours, due to their extensive workload.

Deep maintenance was conducted through the US FMS system and is essentially a complete OEM system reset.

Future Australian UAV operations The ADF has built an extensive bank of experience in operating UAVs in Afghanistan, first with the ScanEagle, and then with the Heron and Shadow.

Despite their small numbers in comparison to the fleets operated by the US and other Coalition partners, their support of Australian and Coalition combat forces on the ground have undoubtedly contributed to those missions’ successes.

That experience has seen the ADF develop the fundamental building blocks of UAV operations – the personnel required for operating and sustaining those types of capability at the edge of the envelope.

While the future of the Heron operation post-Afghanistan remains in question, a new project to acquire a Medium Altitude Long Endurance UAV platform was expected to be included in the Defence Capability Plan that was due to be released by the former goverment about six months ago.

Should that go ahead, both that project, expected to be given the project number AIR 7100, plus the existing AIR 7000 Phase 1B project to acquire a high altitude maritime surveillance UAV will benefit greatly from the corporate knowledge developed with the Heron operation.

But in the meantime the Heron and Shadow deployments to Afghanistan have demonstrated just how cost-effective UAVs are in providing essential ISR support – even if their story remains relatively untold in Australia.