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Upgrades to Aurora aircraft puts Royal Canadian Air Force on cutting edge of anti-submarine warfare
The silhouette of a nuclear-powered U.S. navy Los Angeles class attack submarine, its periscope slashing through the surface, was quickly spotted by the crew of a Royal Canadian Air Force CP-140 Aurora maritime patrol aircraft during a five-hour mission south of the Hawaiian Islands over the weekend.
Within seconds of the discovery of the kind of boat that Tom Clancy made famous in the Hunt for Red October, the Nova Scotia-based turboprop swooped down to 100 metres above the ocean. The crew dropped several dozen passive and active sonar buoys as they circled near the target on a night when those in the air and at sea had the benefit of a dazzling full moon and a placid sea.
“We went out, hunted for it, found it, tracked it and did some simulated attacking,” said Maj. Angie Thomas who helped oversee the crew working a bank of sensors and radars.
“We had a few glitches with our computers during the flight because no equipment is perfect. But we were able to overcome those as we know we can with the procedures (we have) in place and it actually makes for great training. We try to train as we fight and tonight was a perfect example of that and a great success.”
Precisely what the Auroras anti-submarine warfare (ASW) are capable of is of keen interest to the 22 navies participating in RIMPAC 2014. Two of the three Auroras that the RCAF has brought to the largest naval war games in the world have new Canadian-made Block III sensors and mission computers that may give Canada the deadliest anti-submarine warfare platform in the world.
“By leaps and bounds, we are far more capable with this aircraft,” said Warrant Officer Darren Struble as he prepared to throw a sonar buoy out of a tube that had been opened in the belly of the aircraft. “We are on the cutting edge of anti-submarine warfare.”
The difference between the old monochrome screens and the colour ones used now is that the aircrew have a lot more situational awareness, he said. However, none of the 16 personnel on board the aircraft were able to provide many details about the video game wizardry they work with because almost everything about the Auroras’ expanded capabilities is top secret.
The latest upgrades to the Auroras have greatly improved the aircraft’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, the crew said. Such improvements do not come cheap.
While the possible purchase of F-35 stealth fighters and the drawn out acquisition of new helicopters for the RCAF have received far more political and media attention, Canada has quietly spent more than $1.5 billion on upgrading 14 of its 18 Auroras. The price tag includes improvements slated to extend the life of the already 30-year-old airframes for at least another 15 years.
While the Auroras’ high-tech specialty is ASW, the aircraft also carry out patrols to assert Canadian sovereignty in the High Arctic, map out routes across polar ice and tundra for Inuit Ranger patrols, monitor foreign fishing fleets on the Grand Banks and off the British Columbia coast and assist with search and rescue missions over land and sea.
Canada’s three Auroras in Hawaii lined up at a U.S. Marine Corps air station on Oahu Island beside identical U.S.-made P-3 Orion air frames flown by aircrews from Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.
“The change is huge. We’ve gone from being nearly obsolete to having the best of the best,” said Sgt. Francois Leveille of Montreal. “I’d put us up against a U.S. Navy P-3 any day.”
The hunt for the L.A. class sub, which was done in conjunction with several surface warships, was relatively easy because these were the first ‘baby steps’ of the month-long exercise. In a few weeks, the Canadian aircrews in Hawaii will participate in much more complicated war games scenarios where it is most unlikely that “enemy subs” will be found near the surface.
“There are a lot of ships, a lot of submarines and a lot of aircraft, so it is a very complex air space, water space and sub-surface space,” said the crew commander, Maj. Doug Publicover, who flew the mission and like everyone else on the aircraft is from CFB Greenwood N.S.
There were “a lot of different accents, a lot of different inter-operabilities where countries do not necessarily speak English as their first language. So it means communicating by radio is sometimes difficult. But we all speak a common language and that is what we are here to enhance.”
Angie Thomas, who is part of the RCAF’s Maritime Proving and Evaluation Unit, said the new state-of-the-art consoles in some of the Auroras are almost impossible to compare with those they replace “because we flex so far forward into the future.”
Having recently taken part in a NATO training exercise in Norway, the major said: “It was really amazing to see the different scenarios that we could put ourselves in, to the different weather that we could fly in and the capability that we could bring to the flight. I absolutely believe that we have one of the leading P-3 Aurora aircraft in the world for ASW to ISR to EW (electronic warfare). It is just going to become more amazing as we figure out the new tools.”
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*For the record, that isn't a sonobuoy the WO is holding; it's a SUS (Signal Underwater Sound).
** what the author calls 'sonar buoy' is actually called 'sonobuoy'.
