The Lone Ranger

Triton will be able to observe the activities of suspect ships carrying drugs or other contraband, chart the activities of Japanese whalers, or track asylum seeker vessels, all in real time, descending from 55,000 feet to take a closer look at vessels of interest.

In event of hostilities, Triton could support a naval task group, tracking foreign warships, detecting and classifying their electronic emissions at long range.

Eventually there will be six and maybe seven Tritons, based with Poseidon and Predator at the new intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) precinct the RAAF is standing up at RAAF Edinburgh, South Australia.

As the capability matures, the RAAF will look to an overland surveillance role for Triton, as it did with the predecessor AP-3C Orions.

There’s plenty of work ahead of the arrival of Triton Number One. Some buildings constructed at RAAF Edinburgh for P-8 can be shared with Triton but more infrastructure will be needed.

More work also needs to be done on crewing. Initially Triton pilots will come from the P-8 fleet. However, a 24-hour sortie for a single aircraft could involve three crews, each comprising pilot and mission systems operator.

The RAAF has been working on a Triton concept of operations for some years, which is likely to evolve as Australian and US Navy aircraft start flying operations.

As occurred with P-8, Australia and the USN have signed a cooperative agreement, with us learning from the Americans as they start flying their Tritons operationally.

That’s likely this year, with the first aircraft expected to fly from Guam. That might have happened sooner were it not for an operational pause prompted by a mishap at the US Navy base at Point Mugu, California in September.

Precisely what happened hasn’t been disclosed. The US Navy said the aircraft had an issue in flight and it was decided to return to base. The engine was shut down for landing but the landing gear did not extend.
As sensors are located on the lower fuselage, this was a very expensive belly landing and the A$150 million aircraft was written off.

Following an operational pause, Tritons are now flying again. This won’t impact Australia’s Triton acquisition.

Group Captain Jason Lind, director of the intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, electronic warfare and space group within RAAF headquarters, said Triton would be a very significant capability for an island nation like Australia.

“It can pick up large vessels warships or other things at very long range,” he said.

“It can stay airborne for 24 hours. It flies around 300 knots. It is a significant capability that could be doing all sorts of things anywhere over the ocean. Maybe we will even consider putting it over land as well if we need to.”

Group Captain Lind the concept was that Triton would work with P-8 as part of a networked air force and joint force, along with other capabilities.

As a surveillance asset, Triton would cue P-8 for some particular response. That could be a rescue at sea mission, with Triton locating the distressed sailors and handing off to P-8 for delivery of an air-sea rescue kit.

In a warfighting situation, Triton could cue an F-35 for delivery of a Naval Strike Missile (NSM).

In the first instance, detection of objects of interest might actually have originated with the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN), Australia’s over-the-horizon radar which can detect and track targets as far out as the Indonesian archipelago. JORN, Triton, Poseidon and more will all form an ISR system of systems of outstanding capability.

By the time the first Triton reaches Australia, it will have been more than two decades since the concept of UAS HALE surveillance emerged as an alluring possibility.

It has long been recognised that maintaining any level of surveillance over Australia’s vast area of interest and eight million square kilometres exclusive economic zone is especially challenging.

Traditionally this job has been done by ships and aircraft, most recently the RAAF’s fleet of AP-3C Orions.

JORN offers considerable promise – the RAAF says it can detect ships the size of an Armidale-class patrol boat or larger and aircraft bigger than a BAE 127 Hawk. However JORN performance is variable and depends on the state of the ionosphere and weather conditions.

Officially it has limited, maybe nil, ability to detect asylum seeker boats, a function of the boats’ small size and wooden construction and JORN’s operational wavelengths in the High Frequency (HF) band.

JORN’s true capabilities – it reportedly can detect stealth aircraft – remain classified. That capability will certainly improve, under a $1 billion upgrade program now being conducted by BAE Systems Australia.

Life would be so much simpler if the vast majority of Australia’s regional surveillance could be performed from the JORN operations centre at RAAF Edinburgh. But it’s long been recognised that there’s no single solution and what’s needed is a layered surveillance system of JORN, aircraft and ships.

The rise of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in the 1990s seemed to offer great promise. Australia’s interest was especially piqued by Global Hawk, developed by Ryan Aeronautical, now part of Northrop Grumman, to meet a US Air Force requirement for broad area overland surveillance, akin to the job done by the Lockheed U-2.

‘It can pick up large vessels at very long range.’
GPCAPT Jason Lind

The first Global Hawk flew in February 1998. The aircraft’s ability to fly intercontinental distances was amply demonstrated in April 2001 with a non-stop flight from Edwards USAF base to RAAF Edinburgh, covering 13,219 kilometres in 22 hours.

That was the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific and a world record for absolute distance flown by a UAV.

But what Australia really needed was a high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) UAV configured for broad area maritime surveillance (BAMS).

So too did the US Navy and in 2008, a “navalised” Global Hawk won the US Navy BAMS contest against contenders from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. This was Triton.

Despite the need for this capability, Australia has run hot and cold. The coalition government of John Howard gave first pass approval in 2006 for participation in cooperative development of a maritime Global Hawk with the US Navy.

But in 2009 Labor defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon announced Australian involvement would be deferred, citing pressures on the RAAF as it transitioned from Orion to Poseidon.

As well, Global Hawk prices were soaring, rising from under US$80 million in 2002 to US$150 million in 2010. In 2006, Congress came close to cancelling Global Hawk. For a highly developmental program, this was a familiar story.

‘In the long term, system breaches and break-ins are inevitable.’

The first MQ-4C Triton flew
in May 2013. Although similar in appearance to Global Hawk, Triton is purpose-built to operate in a maritime environment.

The airframe has been strengthened with de-icing capability, hail and birdstrike protection and sensor and avionics compartments fully sealed for operation in all weather conditions.

With a wing span of almost 40 metres (larger than a Boeing 737 MAX) and gross weight of 14 tonnes, Triton carries a suite of useful sensors.

The primary sensor is the Northrop Grumman AN/ZPY-3 MFAS (multi-function active sensor) radar, which provides 360 degrees coverage and a range of modes including maritime surface search and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), to image and identify different vessels.

Triton’s electro-optic and infrared (EO/IR) system is the Raytheon Multi-spectral Targeting System (MTS-B), which provides day and night high-resolution still and video imagery. MTS-B is a variant of the widely used MTS, in service aboard a large range of aircraft including Predator.

Initially Triton came with a basic electronic support measures (ESM) package to monitor and classify ship electronic emissions.

But the US Navy decided it needed something much better and the result is the Multi-INT, a system of low and high band signal receivers, able to detect across a wider frequency spectrum and discern more signal characteristics.

Multi-INT has been compared to a modern high definition flatscreen TV alongside a traditional cathode ray set. The end result is an impressive capability to detect ship radar signals and identify the vessel.

The US Navy initially planned two Triton variants – one for BAMS and one with the multi-INT capability – but decided to go with one, with all US Tritons to carry the multi-INT capability. So too will Australian Tritons.

In US Navy service, this means Triton will do the job of the EP-3E Aries, a variant of the Orion equipped for signals intelligence. These aircraft will be retired as Triton enters service.

In Australian service, every Triton will do the job of the RAAF’s two remaining AP-3Cs, both modified with enhanced electronic surveillance capabilities.

Triton’s fourth sensor is a receiver for the widely used Automatic Identification System (AIS) which enables identification of individual vessels from their onboard transponder. This is the maritime version of comparable aviation identification systems.

Triton is assembled alongside Global Hawk at the Northrop Grumman facility at Palmdale, California, now ramping up to full-rate production for aircraft for the US Navy, Australia and maybe others.

The US Navy program of record is 68 aircraft.

Group Captain Lind said Defence would periodically go back to Government to buy extra Tritons. All six, or maybe seven, are likely to be in service by end of the decade.

“At the moment, we are planning to put some people into the US starting around mid-2020, over into VUP-19, the training squadron for the Triton in the US Navy and then taking some crew over there to train our first cadre of crews,” he said.

“We will bring some of that back and start our own training capabilities from there.

To launch an initial Triton capability, the RAAF, like the US, plans to draw on pilots trained to fly P-8.

“The US Navy is basically saying if you can fly a P-8 we will give you a conversion on to Triton and that’s the way you can do it. That will work – there’s no doubt about that because the USN is very good at transitioning to new capabilities,” he said.

“That’s a reasonable start point. But where do we go into the future? There’s a fair bit more work to do as we don’t really understand that much about this kind of remote capability.”

The RAAF gained experience of extended UAS operations in Afghanistan, flying Heron operationally using a crew of two, pilot and sensor operator who sat side by side in a specially outfitted shipping container.

Although there’s a view that anyone with the appropriate aptitude could be trained off the street to fly a UAV, the ADF believes that someone operating a large, very expensive and sophisticated piece of kit like Triton, through controlled air space, should first know how to fly a regular aeroplane.

“There’s a lot we need to learn and we are taking as many lessons as we can. There is a lot more opportunity to have long periods of on-task time which means crews will have to change. That’s a fairly novel concept for us,” Group Captain Lind said.

Under the cooperative agreement with the US Navy, Australia gets to see just how the US manages its Tritons. There was a very similar cooperative program for Poseidon.

Group Captain Lind said the US and Australia gained a lot from such cooperative programs.

“If we are as successful with Triton as we have been with P-8, we will be extremely happy,” he said.

“It’s not just being on their coat tails. Our personnel are in there. We also have quite a bit of knowhow from DST (Defence Science and Technology group). Being a cooperative program means we get our capability very soon after the US fields them.”

As it now stands, US Navy and RAAF Tritons will be identical, apart from the markings.

That was also the plan with Poseidon, except that Australia had a requirement for a search and rescue role, which the US didn’t.

“When we were looking at what we might do with P-8 in the cooperative program, we said what’s really important to us is having something like an air-sea rescue kit so we can do search and survivor supply, something we had done for a long time with our P-3s. That wasn’t on the road map for P-8,” he said.

“We met IOC on the P-8 about a year ago and it had that capability which wouldn’t have been there otherwise.”

The RAAF doesn’t have that capability in mind for Triton, but who knows how sensor technology will evolve in coming years.

While Triton will be home-based at RAAF Edinburgh, it will also operate from RAAF Tindal in the Northern Territory and, if the need arises, from much further afield.

That will mean eventual development of an expeditionary capability. Conceivably that could see Triton flying from Cocos in the Indian Ocean or AMAB in the United Arab Emirates.

From day one, Triton will also have to be supported and that will bring abundant opportunities for Australian industry.

Group Captain Lind said the RAAF was already thinking about how to maintain these aircraft.

“We will be working really closely with the US Navy on how they do it and how we might leverage off some of their support methodologies. There will be quite a bit of work for Australian industry,” he said.

Northrop Grumman has already spoken with Australian companies. Director of international programs for Triton, Ed Graziano, said there was a robust plan for Australian industry involvement in production of aircraft and in their long-term support.

Graziano said some industry partnerships were already in place for supply of components such as cables and sheet metal which would be expanded to include electronic equipment, composites for airframe parts and sensors.

“We are working with Quickstep, Qinetic, Daronmont, Ferra, Marand and others,” he said.

“They will support not just the build-up and delivery of Australian aircraft and systems but also US Navy systems.

“We need to ensure we have a cost-effective solution for both the Australian and US navies. We need to find the sweet spot where there is a technology and a capability that the (Australian) SMEs can take on to be able to provide either that work required or the sub-systems. We are going through that.”

Graziano said Northrop Grumman planned to train Australian nationals to be able to support, operate and maintain the aircraft.

“We do also look at industry capability development as part of road mapping with the SMEs. We have had some dialogues with (Australia radar firm) CEA Technology … about sensor concepts and development.”