Maritime Patrol Aircraft - Best/Worst Features

[Croqueteer]

I believe the French are renovating the Atlantique for another 30years' life. That is what we should have had to replace the Shack, we could have had twice as many for less than half the price.

[Pontius Navigator]

Croqueteer, the advantage that the Nimrod had over the Shack, and by extension the Atl, was a high transit speed enabling it to reach a patrol area 1,000 miles out in about 2.5 hours compared to double that in a Shack. Faster transits enabled fewer airframe to maintain a patrol box.

On patrol the Atl speed would be around 190 kts compared with around 225 for the Nimrod. This enabled either a faster revisit time or a larger patrol area for the same revisit time.

However our boss at the time opined that the floor level on the P3, and by extension the Atl, was better as it was lower allowing more room for the crew at waist level (no cracks about the galley) for moving about.

[Tinribs]

British Radar

When we first saw the Searchwater at RAE RRs it wasn't that great, I once saw Wolf Rock logged at doing 20 knots but improved rapidly and when it was released I understand crews were v happy with it

[Running Ridges]

Originally Posted by Pontius Navigator

However our boss at the time opined that the floor level on the P3, and by extension the Atl, was better as it was lower allowing more room for the crew at waist level (no cracks about the galley) for moving about.

Thanks , that's exactly the sort of anecdotal stuff I'm looking for. any other titbits where that came from?

[sargs]

Tinribs:

When we first saw the Searchwater at RAE RRs it wasn't that great, I once saw Wolf Rock logged at doing 20 knots

That's nothing to do with the Searchwater - it's the quality of nav input that affects the radar ground plot. Perhaps the IN in your Viscount just wasn't up to the job?

[aw ditor]

Croqu. Are the French replacing the RR Tynes', I would have thought they were the limiting factor on a refurbish/update of the Atlantique'.

AD'

[Croqueteer]

AD, I don't know. Pontius, as you know it is time on task that counts. I seem to remember that the Nimrod needed a transit of 500nms to exceed the Shacks time on task, but the Atlantique would beat the Nimrod out to over 700nm, but my memory is not what it was. I was banned from speaking to VIPs in MAAU for expressing my views!

[Rossian]

For Fosini.....

......as long as you discount the S3-A (no longer in the asw game) there are no ejection seats in MPAs. No scrabble boards either and I did hear a dreadful rumour that even Uckers boards were no longer in crewrooms!!
When one hears phrases like "agile" "fully networked" "integrated" et alia, you know your in shakey ground territory.
I hold to my earlier post that THE most vital part of an MPA fit is a properly trained crew, working together,

The Ancient Mariner

[thunderbird7]

...ejection seat in the AEO position, controlled by the rest of the crew...

[Pontius Navigator]

Croquetter, only got described in the AEW Shack but remember spending a week or two getting as far as Benbecular but in a Nimrod entering the HUATA before a 180 into the North Sea (best trap ride we did) or doing one patrol in North Sea and a spec OP west of Ireland on the same sortie.

Don't know about the Atl but loved it doing 300+ in the Nignog running down a May. OTOH a Bear could out run a Nimrod.

Back to the OP, good - quiet jets, bad noisy props. Good - economical props - bad thirsty jets.

Provided a noisy prop could avoid running its sound footprint over the target it probably had the edge.

[Union Jack]

More grist for the mill, "hijacked" with acknowledgements to Arrse:

https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/th...y-lady.259150/

Jack

[The Old Fat One]

Op,

Assuming the airframe gets you on task reasonably/relatively swiftly and keeps you there in relative/reasonable safety for a relative/reasonable length of time the deciding factor (by a country mile) is the internal mission fit, weapon load and, of course, competence of the crew.

All the airframes you mention, plus others, are perfectly fit for purpose, with of course individual pros and cons (some of which are mentioned, particularly by PN, whose points are pertinent and solid)

The mission fits and crews are/were/will be always the deciding factor as to which is superior. Thus a Nimrod MK1 was inferior to a P3C update 2 (albeit some US crews, especially the reserve ones did not have a fkn clue what to do with it ), but the Nimrod MK2 quickly leapfrogged the P3Cu2, and so on and so forth.

[PingDit]

I think the Neptune still holds the record for an airborne time at around 32 hours? Great if you can build it, but as ex Nimrod, I don't think we'd have been able to load enough honkers/pies to manage that sort of weight v. fuel airborne time.

[Surplus]

I have a hazy recollection of the Atlantiques going home from SharpGuard because they couldn't carry the required payload for the requested duration at the high operating temps at the time. (Hazy recollection due to the room parties at the Baia Verde.)

[Glaaar]

Originally Posted by Running Ridges

Evening all!

I've been assigned a Uni Project, with brief to design a clean sheet Maritime SAR / Submarine Hunting aircraft. I thought this might be a good place to canvas some opinion on what makes a good aircraft for that role. Hence my question for those who have designed / built / flown / worked on / maintained any fixed wing Maritime Patrol aircraft (P-3, P-8 & Nimrod spring to mind) :

What are the best and worst features of these aircraft? Design features & capabilities that you admired and things that made your life difficult while working on them?

I'd really appreciate any input, whatever your link to the aircraft, so thanks in advance if you can contribute.

Cheers, RR

Others have given you the Mission Tree as a system driver, I am going to invert that and give you the Cost Vee as an Inventory/Flight Hours restrictor. O&S costs are what make your platform useful, as much if not more than individual mission capabilities.

Looking at some common MPA mission element needs vs. Platform Costs:

1. ASST Hi/Lo 100 million entry 200hrs/year.
2. ASUW Hi/Lo 60 million entry 300hrs/year (the Sort to Morte cycle is critical in cluttered sealanes).
3. SAR 35 million entry 50hrs/year (depending on region, you can have so many live calls that training is only necessary for turnover reasons).
4. Overland ISR 50 million entry 500hrs/year (requires multiple service partnership agreements which means range time and coordination via big staffing).
5. ASW 150 million entry Variable. (Lotsa long range navigation training = pricey).
6. Signals 75 million entry. Variable (BO funded).

If you know your CPFH on a specific platform configuration, you can start to guesstimate your yearly O&S and that in turn sets your inventory size. Coverage is often more important than absolute capability in the civilian/peacetime missions while the exact opposite is true of warfighter capacity, both in terms of utilization rates and training hours.

The Kondor Mission. Sending an airliner sized platform into harms way to target naval traffic for weapons fired by other platforms is moronic because it doesn't provide the continuity of track to offset the asset value risk. The Tu-95 Bear D comes to mind as a platform which enabled the entire AVMF approach to sinking USN Carriers and REFORGER complexes but whose limited persistence and short sensor range as well as predictable track (you can spot the acoustics of the propjets with OTH-B and this plus the profile made it easy to kill) made it a simplistic target set, even discounting the Big Bulge limits. The Russians eventually resolved this with ROR/EOR and a variant of the Tu-143 drone which let them proceed directly to the mission area and gate through optical means rather than radar.

Conversely, using a large MPA in a littorals environment can be quite useful for the simple reason that a CN-235 or C-27 or even a Herk with RORO kit don't have the altitude/speed ability to roll back the sensor horizon while remaining well stood off from an air or coastal SAM threat but a turbine MPA can do either the low dash or the loitering look-in. Conversely, the threat naval small craft themselves often have very limited S2A capabilities and so, provided you are willing to accept limited operational area flexibility in terms of early acquisition and zone to zone patrol area switching a small turboprop can get you a long ways.

Moving from eyeball to shooter means scaling the platform and adding wing structural enhancement to support external pylon carriage as aerodynamic clearances. This tends to give some big hits in terms of operational radius (weight on end of wing is never a good idea as the necessary beefing carries through all the way to the roots). However; pylons are cheap compared to inserting a weapons bay. A compromise option which is being increasingly looked at is the CABS approach with a ramp system and an ejector system like MCALS. This tends to limit the ultimate size as penetration speed and standoff of your weapon (no Klub, no Brahmos) but it can be useful if you've already accepted the widebody hit for other mission reasons or because of existing inventory mods.

Search and Rescue is basically a coordination function for any platform in which it is not a primary mission driver. Simply because the Dumbo Driver on a deployed rescue craft and swimmers is a very high order risk for them and the platform. However; it has elements which can be combined with other systems/missions (AAR for helos and ASST capable ISAR for rapid traffic sort and look-in on high wave troughs). The big variable here tends to be how far out from how many dedicated basing points you want to cover. SAR can also have a big effect on airframe lifing if your chosen platform cannot get above the Wx.

Overland ISR. Though hardly new (it was done with Neptunes on the HCMT), one the more recent rediscoveries, via the Outlaw Hunter/Viking programs, was just how suitable the enhanced loiter of an ASW platform can be when employed overland to hunt for baddies in conditions where elevation and/or total search areas (or primitive/limited basing modes) conditions excluded the more conventional UAS option. Smaller platforms tend to be better overall (as small as a C-12/21) for economies reasons but a dedicated sensor operator cabin and multiple apertures favors the jet or larger turboprop for a higher threat areas, not least because you offset sortie costs with AAR. Where you are a heavy exponent of NSW in over the beach operations, an MPA can also be a comms relay, targeting and occasional a direct fires support platform of significance because it's got the service plug-in and range to integrate within the BMC2 command hierarchy directly.

ASW. Probably the least useful of the MPA roles, IMO. Anyone who has a fixation with Das Boot styled submarine warfare has no clue what the trends (see: Irans Type XXIII styled minis) are heading towards as unmanned assets and NCW enabled coastal defense by platforms that are either swarm kamikaze or pure sensor nodes for CAPTAM or landbased TELs. Even in those instances where you have an SSN/SSK operating inshore, the tendendcy is towards AShM, not Torpedo engagement, which means your threat zone has just doubled in size from a 10-15nm radial to 50nm (Western) and 100nm (Everyone Else). Hunting with airborne assets has few advantages compared to 1/10th cost coastal patrol surface alternatives due to flow noise issues and magnetics in the shallow water environment. Coverage + Cost counts and hulls beat airframes here, everytime.

Blue Water, the hull costs rapidly start to rise but ASW is even more of a sanitization mission (clearing the empty) set which has a long-dwell baseline requirement to catch the maneuver sprint. More than any other mission environment, this area really supports the use of dedicated UUV with fuel cells and a tender, backed by a long range torpedo delivery system off an otherwise undistinguished SSC. Active Search _works_ when it is off a rapidly relocatable, potentially sacrificial, signal source. Bistatics at sea have always been simple.

Strategic, the need is there as frankly there is nothing else which has the reactivity to get rapidlly to a threat boomer before it can unload the /other half/ of it's SLBM or SLCM load on you. But the problem becomes one of both initial and diminishing returns as well as the necessity of other-platform/system handoff to get preemptive engagement. This is really something that only the major powers can pretend to play at and since they are all nuclear capable with large attrition absorption factors, it's a game that is better not played. As we shift to SSLs for air defense and from subsonic to super and hypersonic flyouts (functionally replacing manned airpower which is both too slow and too costly for the daily DMPI counts achieved) this could change as you will increasingly see A2AD/ICD approaches denial simply outranged by platforms which are never vulnerable to BASM/ASCM as a carrier is.

The ulimate driver here then becomes the threat-mirror image extent to which an opfor appears to be willing to invest in the cripplingly expensive technology base of submarine design but with the lapsing of many technology proliferation regimes, there is a definite cost trend towards mixing strategic and theater platforms as hull counts, using the SSGN-728 example off Libya as test point (imagine this with an HSSW with 1,000nm range or a CICMB with 1,500nm range and you begin to understand the differentiation between Blue Water and Strategic sets, at a sub nuclear level...).

Signals used to be a cheap and easy way to avoid the Pueblo/Liberty scenario by throwing a palletized broadband receiver into the back of whatever with a plug'n'play hatch or drogue line for the aperture. Increasingly, this is simply not the case as many threat states simply show no intention of respecting National Asset status or 12 mile limits and either ram or shoot down our E-ferrets. If you're not stealthy, cool and able to persist at over 60,000ft, you're not survivable and that's in peacetime.

This as well as the extended dwell condition (closed societies, different ethnies = impenetrable) prediction on many test events is driving us towards highly specialist platform capabilities in the higher end theater platforms and towards sub-maritime systems as the ESM packages continue to scale down in roles like the ISA Centra Spike activity and I'm sure, later ones chasing cell phone comms in SWA (if nothing else, the need to move to low level to get good directional capture on these systems, depending on the tower node geometry takes the big platform out of the picture).

So... Your biggest 'industrial secret' (must be kept from defense industry bidders at all costs) is the program allocation you have worked out within your Defense Acquisition agency in civiian government as being politically sustainable. You then take HALF that value to your spec writers in the developmental side of the game (one of the unmentionables of acquisition is that there are more leaks from inside defense than the political side, simply because of incestuous contacts between serving/retired uniform staff and the much higher career penalties for a politician and his small cleared-in staff) and make it fund your primary mission driver as platform selector, modified by any requirement/option to use existing inventory.

Once you have set your principle platform size, you add more nice-to-have secondary missions to the limit of your unstated program allocation and begin to do trades studies with other systems in an NCW condition. The Primary Mission set must make it through the neck of the vee as a funnel. Anything past that is gravy but there are options to losing so many missions that your program becomes to specialized to be funded.

Having it be a center enabler node in a star of UUV/USV/UAS that can be ported to the theater separately by another service is going to become an increasingly important MPA conditional qualifier as environmental conditions, especially those specific to a warighter, simply makes the air-only solution untenable for capability or cost. That said, BMC3 as coordination will take on increasing importance as we will increasingly find ourselves no longer able to support the costs of service centric, capital-center enabled, high intensity, warfighters. In this, a 500 million dollar MPA vs. a 25 billion dollar CVSF tends to set perspective.

But to scale wider requires a joint/multiservice command structure which has _serious acquisition authority_, to reconfigure operational commands into co-supporting architectures, separate from any uniform color loyalties. To functionally effect this means tearing down the military and rebuilding it and is one of the big reasons why RMA is the promise which institutional-inertia simply doesn't happen short of mass die off from total funding starvation.

[MPAStudent]

We'd like to follow up on this post because we've been given what we suspect to be exactly the same task by our university (in conjunction with an aircraft manufacturer that I don't know if I'm allowed to name but rhymes with Hairmuss). We've got a detailed specification and a systems engineering approach and suchlike sorted out so our questions are more along the lines of ergonomics. As current or prior MPA crew members would you prefer to be seated at the consoles in a single line or two lines back to back?

Should the mission planning area be near the consoles? Near the pilots? Out of the earshot of everyone so you're not distracted?

Are observation windows particularly useful now that we have good EO turrets? Would you prefer a slightly bubbled window to improve the view out or a smidge more speed/range?

How long is a typical mission for you and how much of that time would you spend resting/working?

Would you mind having to hump 100-odd sonobuoys out of the aircraft individually (through a tube), could you manage if there were 30 tubes and you just had to reload them occasionally, would your lives be far easier if they were all in tubes and ready to go? How much speed/range would you trade in for that?

Do you mind if we put the toilet near the consoles or should it be as far away from the crew areas as possible, next to the emergency ditching seats?

Maintainers, what do we need to do to make your lives easier? How long would it take to reload a sonobuoy tube on the ground? A torpedo in a bay? A missile on the wing? What's the limiting factor on turnaround time (assuming a fresh crew) and what would you recommend to reduce that?

That sort of thing. On your aircraft, which design decisions worked and which did not? Who were you jealous of for their nice features? Who did you take the piss out of for their piece of crap?

I appreciate that's a lot of questions but ultimately the better our responses now the better our future designs will be. Think of it as an investment in being able to shake your stick at the new youngsters and say that things were tougher in your day!

Thanks,
A bunch of grateful students

[Pontius Navigator]

I am sure many comments will be heavily biased to personal preference. I will pick up on just two for now.

I have flown in aircraft with a toilet behind the flight deck and one down the back. The time out of the office was minimised when using the forward position. OTOH the Mad Operator and Galley Slaves would possibly opt for one aft.

Windows? EO may be good but human eye has a far wider field of view. No matter how wide you create an EO display it will be in the operators central vision area. Looking out the window you can be alerted by peripheral vision.

Slewing an EO head may also take longer initially. Anyone remember the manual Vista Trackers on the Nimrod?

[Pontius Navigator]

As no one has popped up let me address your torpedo question. First, torpedoes are often loaded on a carrier beam with perhaps 3 on the beam. Then, in an action, it is unlikely that an MPA will expend all its torpedoes and may return with some weapons on the carrier beam remaining. Three options are possible. Down load the partial expended carrier and replace with a fresh load. The unexpected torpedoes must be returned to store for servicing. Do not replenish expended weapons; this reduces handling and turnaround time. This will only work if there are sufficient torpedoes remaining, say 4 or 7. Finally replace just the expended torpedoes by offering the torpedo to the installed carrier.

Of the options, do not replenish offers the best time and servicing option. Download and replenish has the greatest time/servicing cost. Replacing individual torpedoes is the middle course ensure a full load out on each sortie.

[Pontius Navigator]

Next, you talk of a mission planning area. The only mission planning area I have come across is in the E3 series where the top of the consoles offers some space to layout documents and so on.

I don't think there is a need for a planning area in the MPA.

[Pontius Navigator]

How long is a mission is task driven and airframe dependent.

If the task is to operate at short range and there are lots of aircraft then 24 hour coverage could be maintained with each aircraft flying for 6 hours with 5 hours on task.

A similar task time a 1,000 mile from base requires a flight time of 10 hours and more aircraft because of the greater transit times.

If extra crew were carried and flight refuelling to extend endurance, then you could use fewer aircraft.