Philippines Assist

Displacing 3. 9 million people, injuring 27,000 and killing 6,000 – at last count – Haiyan also laid waste to entire cities and communities with rare ferocity.

Australia’s response was to initiate a joint ADF operation under Operation Philippines Assist consisting of a Marine Task Force, a Recovery Support Force and a RAAF Air Component.

Not only were 36SQN C-17s and 37SQN C-130Js from the RAAF’sAir Lift Group soon to the fore, Philippines Assist also saw the Navy’s newly introduced MRH 90 make its first international operation deployment.

JTF630

Headquarters Joint Operations Command (HQJOC) located at Bungendore, NSW is the ADF’s operational level headquarters responsible for the planning, control and conduct of ADF operations.

Under its aegis, Joint Task Force (JTF) 630 was established at Ormoc in Leyte province, one of the easternmost islands in the Philippines archipelago and one directly in the path of Haiyan’s fury. The JTF, with detachments in Manila and Cebu, worked closely with the Armed Forces of the Philippines and personnel from the US, UK, NZ and Canada who, through the Multi National Crisis Coordination Centre, provided assistance to the hardest hit parts of the country.

HMAS Tobruk arrived in Ormoc Bay on November 26 with an embarked Army Recovery Support Force, medium landing craft (LCM8) and an MRH 90. Army engineers from the 3rd Combat Engineer Regiment were put to work repairing schools in the Ormoc region, before the ship sailed to Cebu to collect relief supplies which were then distributed to remote islands in the Visayas islands north of Cebu.

The MRH 90 was employed as an ‘organic short notice transport capability’.

RAAF flights in support of Operation Philippines Assist began five days after the typhoon struck, when a C-17 flew an Australian Medical Assistance Team (AusMAT) from Darwin to Tacloban airport.

With an air bridge established, two C-130Js then deployed to Cebu to conduct intra-theatre airlift in support of multilateral relief efforts.

In the process of its deployment, the RAAF’s air element in the Philippines transported 2,250 tonnes of humanitarian and disaster relief supplies, carried international medical teams, Australian government officials and media and ferried approximately 3,500 internally displaced people (IDPs) between Tacloban, Mactan and Guiuan air fields.

Navy air

The Navy’s single MRH 90 (tail number 017) embarked on HMAS Tobruk to provide organic, short notice capability to transport personnel and equipment, either from ship to shore or from local airfields.

The MRH 90 was also on 24hr standby for the medical evacuation of injured personnel and for SAR.

Flight Commander, LCDR Greg Davison of 808SQN Fleet Air Arm spoke with Australian Aviation about the role of the MRH 90 on its first international deployment.

“We sent two aircraft. The squadron found out on the Thursday the 14th of November that we were required to embark on Tobruk.

We had Friday to do all the preembarkation administration, then we flew two aircraft on the Saturday morning from HMAS Albatross up to Townsville to embark on the Sunday. Both aircraft got to Townsville. It was a belt and braces decision, because the ship was sailing on Monday morning so we wanted to make sure we got one aircraft on board. ” As the MRH 90 is yet to achieve its final operational clearance with the RAN, the aircraft was deployed while still undergoing ‘collective training’. Some aspects of its final certification were accelerated to meet operational requirements.

“We weren’t initially allowed to carry the aeromed kit in the aircraft.

That clearance came through in the first couple of days of us being on the ship. It was a collaborative team effort. It was the ability for the Project Office to speed those clearances through, which involved an awful lot of work in Brisbane.

And from that moment on we could react to any casualties ashore, once they were stabilised we could transport [them] to hospital, back to the ship or to meet a more dedicated aeromed asset at one of the regional or international airfields. Obviously the C-17 has a fantastic suite of aeromedical equipment but it can’t get into a muddy field in the middle of the Philippines. ” In the event, none of the MRH 90’s 14 sorties involved aeromedical extractions, LCDR Davison explained.

“We were used in what we would traditionally call the maritime support role. We started with recon.

We were able to take those specialist SMEs – the diving team, the aid workers and so on – take them to areas in the local area to identify a distribution point, landing zone, beach entry for the LARCs and LCVPs that we carried on the ship.

We were able to look at wharves to make sure they were clear and suitable for operations. And we were able to do that from over the horizon. So recon was a particularly important aspect of the aircraft’s employment and enabled the response to be tailored prior to the ship getting on station.

“The area of operations covered 60 to 90nm and we were able to get to any casualty on the ground in an hour. We adopted the alert state ofminutes by day and 60 minutes by night, so we could be on station very quickly to support the aeromed should it have been required. ” As the deployment progressed, 808SQN’s MRH 90 was employed as an ‘organic short notice transport capability’, used to transport personnel or equipment as needed.

“It was logistical support, maritime support, SAR, aeromedical evac, we were on standby, personnel and stores movement. It goes hand in glove with the Air Force’s effort and their air bridge into Taclaban and Mactan. They were able to put C-17s and C-130s into larger airports, but we would pick up personnel and stores and be able to deliver them on a much more tactical level and be able to deliver them to the ship or the areas that needed them.

“The MRH 90 has fantastic endurance, it can, with internal fuel, fly for 3 hours, carries 2. 5 tonnes of internal cargo, can carry a sizeable amount of external cargo.

It can carry up to 20 personnel overland, and its range, endurance and payload is above and beyond the Sea King and Black Hawks’ capability. ”

A different approach

An image common to many humanitarian operations is that of aid aircraft, thronged by wretched survivors, scrambling for food parcels and first aid. LCDR Davison outlined the more focused approach to aid dispersal conducted by the ADF.

“I think an important distinction in the way we conduct humanitarian disaster relief, as opposed to other nations, is that we would tend to establish local liaison with the mayors or tribal chiefs of the provinces of the small areas we went into. We would establish liaison with them first and establish an aid distribution point rather than kicking aid out of the back of a helo when we got there. We were trying hard to minimise the requirement for force protection, and indeed the hazards to people on the ground by putting food on the ground and letting them go at it. ”

Lessons learned

Servicing the aircraft in the humid climes of the Philippines presented its own challenges, especially on the hangarless flightdeck of the Tobruk.

Flight senior maintenance sailor, Chief Petty Officer Gavin Johnson, is no doubt looking forward to the Canberra class LHDs from which the aircraft will operate in the future.

Ensuring that hardearned operational knowledge is not wasted, CPO Johnson explained how lessons of deployments such as Operation Philippines Assist are properly circulated amongst the type’s operators.

“Knowledge is passed between maintenance units. It’s passed back to our logistical support system, so that we can pass that information onto other users of the aircraft, in the form of 5th Aviation Regiment at Townsville and 1st Aviation Regiment at Oakey. So with maintenance activities that we’ve encountered for the first time, and we’re not sure if others have, we will ensure that it’s passed back so that each of the three current maintaining units are not relearning the same wheel. We’re trying to disseminate the same experience to make life a little easier for units that are yet to experience what we’ve been through. ”

Air response

Former C-130H and C-17 pilot WGCDR Jarrod Pendlebury served as the Commander of the Air Component Coordination Element (ACCE) for Operation Philippines Assist, utilising his experience in previous humanitarian missions such as Operation Sumatra Assist in 2004.

With the H model now retired from RAAF service, two stretched fuselage J models were deployed to the Philippines, staging out of the airfield at Mactan airfield in Cebu, due west of the island of Leyte and 30 minutes flying time from the JTF HQ at Ormoc.

Mactan was employed as a ‘hub and spoke’ base, from where delivery flights of aid and personnel would originate. While working with JTF630, the deployed air element stood outside its chain of command, as its ‘customers’ encompassed diverse agencies such as the Philippines government, DFAT and the Australian embassy.

WGCDR Pendlebury explained how taskings were generated: “It was set up as an overarching mission, still controlled by AMCC (the Air Mobility Coordination Centre) at Richmond, but what they did was put us on a Wide Area Geographic mission. We had standing approval to do missions within this geographic area, and AMCC would nominate all of the Philippines and say ‘you’re able to go to any airfield that your aircraft can get to’. I was given the authority to decide which tasks we took on within the bounds of my directive. So within that we were given quite a bit of autonomy.

“Unlike what it’s become like in the Middle East, there wasn’t a really good and strong understanding of where theconcentration of effort needed to be initially. By the time we got there, a few days after the cyclone, we were really having to be quite responsive. So having that authority in-theatre worked really well for us so we could cater our tasks on the day, and say ‘right, remove a sector from here because an important requirement has come up and get the aircraft to where it needs to be’. ” But the C-130J was not the only aircraft utilised by Air Lift Group in support of Operation Philippines Assist. Heavy lifters such as the C-17 and KC-30 have transformed the ADF’s ability to respond to humanitarian crises in the region. WGCDR Pendelbury continued: “We had two C-130Js based in-theatre for the duration for the operation, and we also had the ability to utilise other assets that came into theatre from time to time. So the order, in terms of force assignment of assets, included C-17 and KC-30 support. They didn’t do much intra-theatre, however. There was a requirement to use the C-17 in intra theatre movements to withdraw the DFAT AusMAT and this was one of the great strengths of the C-17 in that we were able to direct-deliver and extract all the equipment they needed. So the C-17 went into Tacloban, and while the airfield was not at its normal strength – it had quite a bit of standing water over the top which affects the concrete – the C-17 was able to get in there and park on the runway. The team and their equipment was unloaded, did what they needed to do for the duration of the operation, then loaded back on. We didn’t need to double handle out of Mactan. ” As the response to the disaster evolved, so too did the missions undertaken by 37SQN’s two Hercs.

“A lot of the initial missions involved pulling internally displaced people out of the worst hit regions, getting people out of the disaster area to relative safety – missions into Tacloban and Guiuan (which were some of the worst hit areas), and into Mactan and Manila. As the mission evolved and the logistic chain became more developed, we then started planning loads to get relief in. Then it became less focused on IDPs and more about cargo and the Philippines military – moving them around to where they were best able to help out. Then towards the end we were starting to see people going back home, which was quite satisfying from our point of view. ” With an array of international airlift assets deployed to the Philippines, the flightline at Mactan was dominated by variants of the ubiquitous C-130. In addition, however, the Italian air force deployed a C-27J Spartan, allowingWGCDR Pendlebury a foretaste of the capability this tactical airlifter will bring to future assist missions when it joins ALG in 2015.

“It affords a real flexibility. The raising and lowering the struts on the gear to vary the height of the ramp is quite useful in these situations, because some of the airfields were initially quite austere, and when the US started drawing down their contribution, the number of available forklifts reduced somewhat because they were going home with the Americans. So [this capability of the C-27J] will be quite useful when there’s only a truck or a very small forklift on hand to load the aircraft. ” Another consequence of the US withdrawal was the drawdown of air traffic controller support. The ADF then turned to the highly experienced JBACs of 44WG, who were charged with handling air movements around Ormoc. As infrastructure was repaired and returned online, ATC duties were handed back to civilian Philippine controllers.

Wind down and withdrawal

As the Philippines government assumed control of rebuilding and reconstruction efforts, JTF630 was directed by Joint Operations Command to begin preparations for withdrawal pending the completion of its Typhoon Haiyan recovery assistance mission in the Philippines.

On December 9 Army engineer machinery, vehicles and around 35 personnel no longer required in the Ormoc region were embarked on HMAS Tobruk and sailed for Australia.

ALG’s outload planners then began drawing up the force mix required for the extraction of remaining ADF personnel still intheatre, specifically the Recovery Support Force combat engineers, tradesmen and support personnel from Townsville’s 3rd Combat Engineer Regiment, who remained at Ormoc until mid-December engaged in cleanup and repair tasks coordinated by DFAT and the Philippines government.

WGCDR Pendlebury explained the virtues of ALG’s newest widebody in facilitating the withdrawal.

“The ability of the KC-30A to come in and take massive amounts of pax and cargo was really useful.

Combined with the oversized capability of the C-17, it means we can redeploy without relying on contracted air mobility options.

From our side, we worked out how many aircraft loads we needed to get home and gave that to our load planners who’d liaise with AMCC who would allocate available assets. ” With the withdrawal complete – five days before Christmas – the ADF could then digest the lessons learned.

“The aircraft and the maintenance personnel are generally the visible manifestation of our disaster response, but the ACCE brought a variety of critical capabilities to the Whole of Government response.

Regrettably, having [performed humanitarian missions in the region] so many times, we knew that with the aircraft there we’d need a reasonably large load team, plus our medical people there in order to provide support to keep the aircrew and maintenance crew well enough to do their jobs. But the ACCE included a variety of other capabilities down to the level of communications and air ops support, and they’re the elements that we know from extensive recent experience that we need to take, and this made planning a much quicker process. The footprint that was developed by our Air and Space Operations Centre at HQJOC worked quite well. ”

A job well done

Indeed, this will not be the last humanitarian assistance operation undertaken by the ADF, and it is to be commended that JTF630, its commander Lieutenant Colonel Rod Lang and the 500 ADF personnel who undertook Operation Philippines Assist acquitted themselves so well and brought valuable, timely assistance to those so desperately in need.

Towards the end we were starting to see people going back home, which was quite satisfying. WGCDR PENDLEBURY