AW&ST:
RAF's New Astor Spy Aircraft Is Ready for Combat
.........Each Sentinel aircrew consists of a pilot and copilot on the flight deck and in the mission compartment, a mission coordinator (including retrained RAF navigators and bombardiers and Navy veterans of the AESA-radar-equipped Sea King) and two image analysts (many of them warrant officers and senior NCOs from the Army intelligence corps or RAF imagery analysts). Two more workstations can be added, although for the first operational deployment British planners say they anticipate flying with the basic crew only and concentrating on perfecting baseline tasks.
Due to the aircraft's long endurance but small crew, "Our operators will be required to perform at the top of their game for 12 hr.," Kemsley says. "While there is room for two more [crewmen], we won't routinely carry more than we need."
Part of the answer to manning will be a tactical display for the pilot and copilot that allows them far greater situational awareness through watching the Link 16 picture. Their job will be understanding the air space and threats to the aircraft. They will control all the defensive aids, which include chaff, flares and towed decoys. The flight deck crew can put target tracks onto Link 16 and, as automation lessens the pilots' workload, they may be assigned other mission roles such as off-board communications with strike aircraft pursuing moving ground targets.
Aircrew training constitutes one of the squadron's primary short-term pre-deployment problems.
"I have crewmen that have never worked in an Istar environment," Kemsley says. "Some of the soldiers have never flown while doing their job. There's a rule that when you step into an airplane, you leave half of your brain behind and when you sit down at the console, you lose the other half. Getting to the point where they are operationally viable is my biggest challenge because the system will have to mature around them."
So far, the squadron has about 140 airmen. That includes photo interpreters without ground moving target indicator (GMTI) or synthetic aperture radar experience. It also has approximately 140 soldiers, and to date fewer than 10 seamen with experience operating GMTI radar on helicopters......