Does this count...
Ilyushin Il-38 Maritime Patrol / ASW Aircraft - Naval Technology

As . . . ?

The IL38 was an Electra/Orionski.

It was cancelled as all the top brass seemed it would be far more important to have fast jets than see something as good as the MRA4 come into service. With potential upgrades to be used to drop bombs and be of a high signifigance in the war in afghanistan the CAS or whatever he is called now seen that as a threat to the fast jet community and hence it was canned. When he came to Kinloss to deliver his speach you can tell something from a face, he was scared and way out of his league. I just hope we have a public enquiry over this situation as he needs to walk now. Spineless very typical of fast jet command these days

LJ,

"But you could run 3x 20hr ASW/LRSAR sorties a day with about 15% of the manpower currently at KIS".

No you couldn't and here's why. ASW requires the extensive dropping of sonobuoys and no unmanned platform currently has that capability or payload option. Added to that is the huge bandwidth requirements of passing acoustic data back to homeplate. Two options therefore would be a huge UAV (Nimrod sized) or lots and lots of Pred B sized platforms that had been suitably modded. Aircraft like the S3 Viking could only carry a small percentage of buoys required in this day and age, so you should be able to see the enormity of the problem. I agree that UAV's have a part to play in routine surface search, which is why the USN is bringing in BAMS to complement the P8. But ASW? - that must be at least 40 years off...

MRA4 Support
 

Softie,

The MRA4 support contract had been under discussion for well over 6 years. The company has provided 5 proposals in the last 4 years, all within the target cost set by DE&S, only for the target to be changed each time before a contract could be agreed. The final proposal was for around £70m per year - the rest of the £200m quoted are the RAF's costs (including RAF Kinloss costs I would think). That is what has been saved - b:mad:er all.

I'd be interested to know why MoD spent so much money on still using that "pressure shell". Why? It is a piece of ancient de Havilland history. Apart from the politics already mentioned here, is there any good reason why the MoD was still dicking about with a Comet fuselage? An inevitable waste of time and money, surely?

Party Animal

Apologies for getting ASW and ASuW mixed up - d'oh!

But I stand by my post on something like the Pred B "GUARDIAN" would make a good surface search MPA and LRSAR asset - as it already does for the US Coastguard and Border Protection Agency.

I also am dubious of your bandwidth argument for sonobuoys - full motion video is far more data hungry than acoustic waveforms, even at high sampling rates.

Point accepted on my scr3w up on ASW vs ASuW though.

LJ

Leaving aside (for now) the issue as to whether or not it was a good idea to use a modified Nimrod design in the first place, the reason for using the 'old' fuselage pressure shell was an attempt to save money.

The techniques used to build it originally are no longer available. So you would have had to redesign the fuselage from scratch - it may externally resembled a Nimrod, but would have had 90s build technology and had to be built with 90s standards as well. And would you design a new aircraft to a 1950s design?

In terms of the cancellation, don't overlook the purely political element - if we are to beleive the press coverage, the decision to cancel we made by Cameron himself. He would have wanted to have a big ticket/cost item to cancel as an example of Labour/MOD waste - and found the carriers were too tightly contracted to do so (word was he would have cancelled CVF2 in a heartbeat).

So he could stand up in the House of Commons and say 'You wasted £XB on this - we're not going to waste a penny more.'

...bit like TSR2, really

But seriously, who would take a 60s panel beat stressed skin fuselage and expect to mate modern CNC milled wings onto it without a hitch?

Surely someone must have seen the problems with accomplishing this from the start?

They should have got a modern aircraft and converted it. Absolute dullards trying to save pennies then ending up costing them $$$ later. :ugh:

The P-8 taking off:

JetPhotos.Net Photo » N541BA (CN: 34394) United States - US Navy (USN) Boeing P-8A Poseidon by Jeremy Lindgren

I'd suggest that the Navy buy fewer than 122 P-8's and more Global Hawks and other UAV's.

Don't see any technological barrier to equipping a UAV to dispense and "listen" to sonobuoys.

Time for a NATO MPA "Wing"...

Been done with E-3 so why not MPA/Tankers/Airlift..

The United States of Europe!

Time for a NATO MPA "Wing"...

Is this NATO MPA wing going to patrol the South China Sea and the Yellow Sea?

Or be confined to the NATO area like Afghanistan or Iraq you mean? With the Naval forces unable to deploy into the Indian Ocean?

OK, not exactly like-for-like but not unrealistic. Anyway, the UK LRMP never went in to that part of Asia so what is new? The Asian TOO was divided at 105 deg East. That would remain a natural dividing line.

Bring MRA4 into service petition
 

There is a petition going here if you are interested:

Nimrod MRA4 to be brought into service

Elmo,
'Listening' to sonobuoys involves rather more than you'd think - you get a lot of different sounds that you then need to analyse/identify, at which point IF one of the sounds is the guy you are looking for you then need to decide target speed, depth, heading, position from what you hear - this involves comparing info from several buoys usually, and whilst aided by a sound knowledge of geometry there's still a touch of an art to it... basically several people working out possible combinations that make sense, whilst rejecting a number of combinations that would match most of the data but don't make sense.

Then there's the number of sonobuoys required - on two consecutive sorties I flew on we dropped 99 buoys each day, it'd be one hell of a UAV that could get airborned with that load aboard, never mind the acoustic processing equipment etc as well.

No, there's no technical barrier to dropping the odd buoy and recieving what it transmits - but you won't find any submarines by doing that.

Dave

Dave

If the average A-size sonobuoy weighs 15kgs then a MALE RPAS like Pred B can carry 1,500kgs then that's 100 sonobuoys. IIRC, Pred B has 7 hard points with a potential for a pod carrying 13 sonobuoys each.

I don't see that in the realms of Science Fiction? Don't forget that Pred B is bigger than an A-10 to look at, so it's a big old bird.

LJ

LJ,

I'm sure you're a pretty clever guy, so you work it out....

AN/AQS-970/971 sonobuoy processor (Canada) - Jane's Avionics

The AQS 970, as fitted to the MRA4, is capable of monitoring 64 sonobuoys at once. Given that fact, do you really think the aircraft was only expected to drop a maximum of 99 in a single sortie?

And having got off with fulload of sonobuoys, detected, tracked, pinpointed and gone for the kill with . . .

Oh sh1t no torps.

Now here's a question. Why are we still putting so much insistence on sonobuoys when things are moving along quickly with new technology. See link:

Asia Times Online :: China News, China Business News, Taiwan and Hong Kong News and Business.

Is it just possible that we cancelled MRA4 because the sonobuoy is about to be rendered obsolete? It might also explain why the US were happy to take MAD off of their P8s?

I'm no ASW expert, but sonobuoys are a pretty old idea and surely we have been a little more inventive in recent years.

iRaven