Eagle Eyed

That was then.

Now, after comprehensive remediation efforts focused on systems integration, combined with a punishing schedule of international exercises, the E-7A has transformed into an in-demand AEW&C asset that’s winning plaudits for its performance, be it at home or on operations over Iraq. Australian Aviation was granted unprecedented access to 2SQN’s and 42WG’s secure facilities at RAAF Williamtown to compile this snapshot of the Wedgetail’s impressive recent achievements.

Writing The Specs

The RAAF had long nurtured the dream of joining the relatively exclusive club of air forces able to deploy organic, airborne early warning and control aircraft (AEW&C). Exchange postings were initiated that saw RAAF personnel train on US Navy E-2C Hawkeyes and US Air Force E-3A Sentries to gain tangible experience of the systems as requirements for an Australian early warning aircraft were gradually formalised.

GPCAPT Antony Martin, Officer Commanding Surveillance and Response Group’s 42WG (whose sole squadron is 2SQN) was one such exchange officer, serving three and a half years with the USN’s E-2C training squadron, VAW-120 in Norfolk, Virginia.

A qualified air battle manager and graduate of the fighter combat control course (FCC), GPCAPT Martin returned to Australia to join the Wedgetail project office in time for the tender evaluation process in 1999.

“I think it was a combination of the experience we’d gained from the E-2Cs and the E-3Ds,” he said of how Australia’s requirement for a mid-sized AEW&C was shaped.

“You had the AWACS, that was right of arc and left of arc was the E-2C Hawkeye, which I had flown.

It had a quite capable radar and mission systems but only with three people in the back, and we felt it was a bit small. So really, we tried to pick the best of breed, or the best of both worlds, from what we saw in AWACS and the E-2s. ” The specification issued under the AIR 5077 Wedgetail projectcalled for 360-degree coverage from a high-performance radar, fully-integrated ESM and defensive countermeasures, commercial-offthe- shelf (COTS) computers, and all packaged within a mid-range airframe size.

Boeing’s submission, featuring a 737-700 BBJ airframe sporting a Northrop Grumman multirole electronically scanned array (MESA), carried the most technological risk but also showed the most promise. It was a paper aeroplane every bit as ambitious as the requirement it was attempting to meet.

In 1999 it was selected to fulfil the AIR 5077 requirement, and the following year Boeing was awarded a $3. 43 billion contract to provide the ADF with four AEW&C aircraft (later increased to six) and associated spares and logistic support.

Wedgetail Of Woes

Integrating Wedgetail’s systems took longer than Boeing, its industry partners or the ADF had anticipated.

These seemingly irremediable bugs caused schedule delays of three years, with the intervening years

It answered questions about deployability, serviceability and reliability.GPCAPT MARTIN

seeing, among other things, financial penalties imposed upon Boeing by the Australian government and independent feasibility testing of Wedgetail’s MESA radar by MIT at the insistence of the DMO. At issue was the Top Hat radar’s high false alarm rate and the inability of its side-lobes to adequately see through clutter. Other problems arose with the integration of the Elta ALR-2001 ESM system (as installed on the AP-3C), which in turn affected the installation of the aircraft’s EWSP suite.

While these issues were being resolved, the Commonwealth agreed to accept its initial tranche of E-7A’s in an ‘as is’ form, allowing crews to begin familiarisation while a concerted program of remediation and further software development began to bring the aircraft up to specification.

“In 2010, when the Commonwealth decided to take the platform as it is, I would say we were probably 80 per cent there,” 2SQN CO WGCDR Christian Martin described of how close the delivered aircraft were to specification when they arrived.

“There was still a lot of stability issues. What we had was a radar, ESM and datalink that would provide a whole picture, but without the resolution and accuracy we have now. So four years ago, on a mission of four hours, the radar would maybe fail twice. ” Five years later, and much progress has been made, with the determined efforts of many parties bearing fruit.

“Now we do missions of 13. 2 hours in the Middle East, with the longest being 16. 3, which is no problem because the aircraft is so comfortable. On those missions, the system performed perfectly from start to finish. So the reliability of the system has been really the key factor for us. “That reliability was the effort of a three part team – RAAF (42WG and 2SQN, the Systems Project Office) Boeing and Northrop Grumman. We’ve put in a lot of effort. Boeing came up with a certain amount of man-hours, and said ‘we will give it to you like this and give you so many man-hours to fine-tune the system’, so we had a remediation program in place. For the radar downlink and ESM, we were able, with the help of engineering and software upgrades, to fine-tune the systems. And, by data analysis after every mission, we managed to finesse the systems to the level that it’s now operating at. It’s an ongoing process. ” GPCAPT Martin identifies another aspect of the broader remediation effort in helping to realise Wedgetail’s potential.

“One was definitely the AEW&C Radar Collaborative Study Program with DSTO, NG, BAE and Boeing that looked not only at the radar performance, but also the mission system. Additionally, other parts of the capability, such as the spares and the logistics pipeline werealso analysed to achieve optimum performance.

“And over the last few years we’ve run a really heavy exercise program – Cope North Guam, Bersama, Red Flag. Going on those overseas exercises, I think they really let the wing and the squadron get a really good feeling for what parts need to be taken away, what skill-sets aircrew required and what procedures maintainers needed to have in place. That’s been extremely important. ”

Operational Experience

By 2012, the RAAF had formally accepted its its final Wedgetail from Boeing. In early 2014, OC 42WG GPCAPT Martin felt 2SQN had made sufficient progress to deploy its Wedgetails operationally. The aircraft was called in to control both fixed and rotary-winged air assets engaged in the search for missing Malaysian airliner, MH370, as part of Operation Southern Indian Ocean.

GPCAPT Martin recalls: “I took over the wing in January 2014 and I was thinking about FOCapproaching, the achievement of which I saw as one of my main missions. So we came back from Red Flag, during which the system had performed really well. A month or two later we got rolled into the southern Indian Ocean. We took off for Perth, and for a couple of weeks out there the techs were working out the back of a car as they had no facilities. Then we deployed to Learmonth and flew for a couple of weeks there. We did around 45 missions, just shy of 500 hours and didn’t drop a sortie. It answered questions about deployability, serviceability and reliability. ” During the search for the missing 777, 2SQN’s Wedgetails performed yeoman service, staying on station for up to nine hours, helping search aircraft get on and off task, relaying comms and weather updates and securing ATC clearances. In the words of the MH370 Air Task Group’s leader, AIRCDRE Craig Heap, Wedgetail was “a tremendous asset”.

With the E-7A successfully deployed operationally,taskings further afield could be contemplated. By late 2014, Australia had joined a coalition effort to dislodge Islamic State forces from Iraq. Thanks to five years of effort, Wedgetail was now ready to deploy to a foreign theatre on operations.

“Our primary role as a Force Element Group is to make sure our forces are trained and ready to a prescribed level,” explained Commander SRG AIRCDRE Chris Westwood.

“When I get the knock on the door from Chief of Air Force (CAF) and Air Commander saying ‘we want two Wedgetails or 20 hours a month on ops’ our role is to make sure we can provide that. So the planning process starts inside Joint Operations Command (JOC), in conjunction with Air Force HQ, and once CAF agrees on capability notice to move, he reaches into SRG and the expectation is we can provide that capability. ”

On Foreign Soil

2SQN has deployed an aircraft to Operation Okra, with crews currently on a four-month rotation, stationed at Al Minhad Air Base in the UAE. When compared to Red Flag exercises, where Wedgetail crews are confronted with fighter v fighter engagments, ECM, ‘hostile’ ground and air threats and contested airspace, missions over Iraq involve more battlespace management that sees Wedgetail providing assistance to tankers and other surveillance platforms.

For its first operational mission, 2SQN’s Wedgetail would use the callsign ‘Magpie’, inherited from its Canberra forebears who used the same callsign over Vietnam.

WGCDR Martin recalls the E-7A’s first mission: “The first couple of flights were meant to be shadowing flights, where we would be airborne along with the USAFE-3, monitoring their activities, collecting data, but just in a shadow capacity. On flight number 1, the E-3 had some issues and it needed to go home, and we were then taking control of the entire airspace on day 1 – an aircraft that had not yet received FOC.

“From that moment on the crew realised they needed to step up, and thanks to the previous two to three years we had a really strong training program that got us to where we are. So by the time we got on station and needed to do the job, we were ready and fully trained to a point where it became almost like second nature. It didn’t take long before the combined air operations centre (CAOC) in Qatar quickly realised the capability that we had, the quality of the information that we were passing and the clarity of the picture we were sending while on station, which made us the platform of choice. So when we talk to the coalition jet fighters, and they’re aware that Wedgetail is airborne, right away they feel comfortable because of the high quality product they have been introduced to. ” The fact that the Wedgetail is rapidly establishing itself as the coalition’s favoured AEW&C

There are many stakeholders responsible for the Wedgetail’s current success.

platform says much about its reliability and the performance of its MESA radar in the congested airspace encountered on Operation Okra. Its 288 high-power transmit/ receive modules drive two side arrays (providing 240° between starboard and port) with the Top Hat array providing 60° both fore and aft.

As its name states, this electronically scanned array radar is multi-role, providing greater utility than the pylon-mounted rotating radars of earlier generation AWACS and AEW&C platforms like the E-3 and E-2.

According to GPCAPT Martin, MESA has provided the step change in airborne command and control. “That’s the heart of the issue. I think the big difference with the mechanically scanned array, that’s what you’re stuck at, every 10 seconds or so that radar comes around and that’s the update rate and search volume you’ve got. Whereas with a MESA radar, you’ve got the ultimate flexibility, you can have a faster update rate in sectors if you want, you can put a high update rate on individual tracks, you can extend the range in sectors – it comes down to flexibility. But everything’s a tradeoff and the real trick is to work out how to manage your antenna sharing between your radar and your IFF and it’s also sharing your airborne search with surface search – when you make changes to one, it affects the other, so you must balance that out. ” The aircraft stages out of Al Minhad, initially talking to UAE controllers, then Bahrain controllers before being handed over to Iraqi ATC. Prior to entering either its assigned north or west sector, Iraqi ATC will perform a handover and Wedgetail assumes responsibility for command and control of the battlespace.

Ip Chat

Deployment on Operation Okra also helped expedite the introduction of IP (internet protocol) narrowband chat capability on Wedgetail, one rolled out in a number of weeks in a joint effort by 42WG, the SPO and Boeing Defence Australia. By using an iridium satellite telephone system, 2SQN Wedgetails are able to communicate by text rather than voice to the CAOC and other users in a network.

“If you want to play with the Americans or a coalition, IP chat is a requirement,” WGCDR Martin explained. “Early last year, the SPO identified significant challenges in setting up an IP chat, potentially delaying its entry into service for many years in line with the [future planned] Phase 5 upgrade. In an effort to keep IP chat going, 42WG and 2SQN put their heads together and thought they could put something together and test it. So, in the middle of last year 42WG started working on something. “It was like MacGyver meets Alexander Graham Bell – the guys at 42WG were working hard, putting cables up, using sticky tape, holding aerials on the tarmac and finally it worked. We had a system that was making our lives that much easier, a great situational awareness tool. It’s like you’re monitoring 15 or 20 different Twitter accounts, where you can put up takeoff times, arrivals, notices about airspace being active, AAR timeslots etc, which can be accessed by the crew at their consoles on board the aircraft. So in a way, it’s a bit of a Cinderella story – it started ugly and it’s not perfect, but it keeps getting better and is a great force multiplier for us. ” WGCDR Martin added that the advantage of IP chat is that messages can be archived and retrieved, as opposed to frequency transmissions which can be missed due to low volume or poor signal. IP allows the Wedgetail air battlespace managers to communicate with the CAOC and other airborne assets in theatre such as fighters, tankers andISR platforms.

“I just came back from an international AEW&C operators working group and the first thing on everyone’s agenda was IP chat. It wasn’t about radar performance. They know their radars have limitations, but the IP chat was the top of the modernisation agenda for each country’s AEW&C platform and they were quite keen to find out what we’ve done on our platform. Every nation operating IP chat at the moment has their unique challenges. As far as lessons learnt from a 42WG point of view, we learned very quickly that the way you train will really dictate the way you fight, and that IP chat really increases our situational awareness. ”

Crew Component

Wedgetail is supported by 2SQN’s 235 personnel, with 105 assigned to maintenance-specific duties as directed by the squadron’s senior engineering officer (SENGO) attending to avionics, airframe, life support, logistics, ground support equipment and systems cryptology. Aircrew number roughly 100, composed of air combat officers (including 10 from Navy), mission specialists and 25 pilots.

2SQN, like its cousins in 92WG on the AP-3C, has elected to keep Wedgetail crews together as a unit rather than assigning crew members into a pool.

“We’re slightly different from other multi-crew platforms in the air force, in that we have a dual command or leadership structure: the aircraft captain and the mission commander in the back,” WGCDR Martin explained. “The captain is looking at overall safety, getting the aircraft on site, AAR and the overall conduct of the mission. The mission commander looks at effectiveness of the platform, best use of the sensors and mission success.

“It’s the mission commander who has ultimate control of all mission crew consisting of up to ten operators [air combat officers, airborne electronics analysts and Navy fighter controllers]. Their roles vary significantly from surveillance and control, electronic warfare and the management of all mission systems including the MESA radar, datalink and ESM. ” Equipped with 10 consoles, the crew has at its disposal a state-of-the-art communications system comprised of HF, VHF, UHF, Link-11, Link-16, UHF Satcom and ICS, as well as the newly-installed IP chat.

Upgrade Path

With FOC slated for May 2015 (around the time the Wedgetail commences tanking trials with 86WG’s KC-30), a roadmap of future upgrades has been outlined, with incremental upgrades being made to the aircraft’s air traffic management system.

GPCAPT Martin explained: ‘We’re now rolling into AIR 5077 Phase 5 which is looking at modifications to the aircraft, particularly mode 5 IFF, wide band satcom and also IP chat system that we put on board as a rapid fitout for Iraq – we’ll be looking at integrating that more into the system. The other big part is a number of things for Single European Sky Regulations (CNS/ATM) so that’s brought a number of compliance upgrades, mode S, transponders and things like that to let the aircraft fly around the world in the future air traffic management arena.

“We do a mission system build approximately every 18 months so we’ll continue to work with that. And we’re also starting to piece together thoughts on the Phase 6 Capability Assurance Program which will be round about the 2025-6 timeframe. ”

Friends In High Places

With an intensive remediation process now yielding tangible operational results, Wedgetail, whose very survival at its nadir in 2006 was in the balance, hasemerged as a rapidly-maturing and highly-capable platform that is earning its spurs both in the crucible of combat in Iraq and in the threat-filled skies over Nellis.

For aircew and ACOs, slots on Wedgetail crews are highly sought after, as postings to the squadron offer challenging flying and the ability to make a meaningful contribution on operations such as Okra, where it is arguably the centrepiece of the ADF’s effort.

For Boeing the project may have caused the odd ‘dark night of the soul’, but it was recently awarded a $901 million contract extension that will see it continue to provide program management, supply chain management, engineering, and maintenance services until at least 2019 in addition to the deeper maintenance and training services it already provides.

There are many stakeholders responsible for the current success the Wedgetail is enjoying, which can certainly be put down to its attributes as an AEW&C platform par excellence but, maybe, also its advocates – both the current CAF and CDF are former officers commanding of the AEW&C project office.

It’s safe to assume that after years of technical troubles, there’s one thing the E-7A’s MESA radar can definitely can see – a very bright and busy future.