Navy Moves Toward Goal of More Surveillance With Fewer Aircraft

Sea Power, Jun 2004 by Burgess, Richard R

Naval surveillance experts envision a future of broader, more persistent coverage of the oceans, faster search and localization of targets, and more lethal response, provided by a smaller force with less manpower and lower lifecycle operational and maintenance costs.

The keys to these prospective achievements are a nextgeneration patrol plane called the Multimission Maritime Aircraft (MMA), and an unmanned aircraft, the long-range, high-endurance Broad-Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) system.

The Navy June 6 will select one of the two industry teams, led by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, vying to build the MMA. At stake are development and production contracts valued at $4.45 billion from 2006 through 2009.

The MMA is designed to replace the Navy's fleet of P-3C Orion four-engine patrol planes, many of which are more than 30 years old and approaching the end of their service lives. The new plane will incorporate features reflecting the Navy's renewed emphasis on the classic patrol aircraft mission of antisubmarine warfare (ASW), and less on the overland surveillance and strike roles in recent conflicts that have won praise for the P-3C from joint combatant commanders.

The Navy decided against a one-for-one replacement of the P-3C, said Capt. Daniel Duquette, the Navy's requirements officer for unmanned air systems. Instead, he said, much of the burden of surveillance is being shifted to unmanned aircraft, so "we won't be flying the wings off the MMA."

"BAMS and MMA represent an important capability designed from the beginning to replace the P-3," Duquette said.

The Navy plans to use the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to search wide swaths of oceans or land areas, rather than sending numerous manned patrol aircraft to cover the same areas at greater expense and risk. A UAV would detect potential targets or contacts of interest and transmit the locating and identifying information to an MMA. The manned aircraft would then be sent to investigate. Teamed in this way, BAMS would enable the Navy to more judiciously dispatch its MMAs to areas of high interest, rather than using the MMAs on less efficient broad-expanse searches.

This concept of operations will enable the Navy to patrol the oceans with fewer patrol planes and hence fewer personnel. The airplane crews and associated maintenance personnel could be cut by as much as half of existing forces. Operating costs also would be less, relative to current expenditures.

Cmdr. Michael W. Hewitt, the Navy's requirements officer for the MMA, said antisubmarine warfare "has never been a mission that we've walked away from." He said the Navy has an ongoing need for "a large-area-search ASW search platform in the future."

Forty-two nations - including some hostile to U.S. interests - operate diesel-electric submarines, a threat both competitors will address in their proposed acoustic sensor systems.

Hewitt notes that the MMA will be fitted with simulation software, enabling crews to conduct full-scale mission simulation in their aircraft while flying from one base to another. Improved ground-based simulators will allow for more realistic training and enable crews to train without actually flying, thus preserving the service life of the aircraft.

Both Boeing and Lockheed Martin are offering designs based on converted airliners, but are taking significantly different approaches in airframes.

Lockheed Martin based its proposal on the P-3 design, itself a derivative of the Lockheed Electra airliner. Called Orion 21, it largely resembles the P-3C, but with new turbo-prop engines and eight-bladed propellers.

Early in the competition, the company planned to offer MMAs built from remanufactured P-3Cs, but that proved impractical given the structural deterioration of the current P3C fleet. Banking on decades of experience with patrol aircraft and antisubmarine mission systems, Lockheed Martin believes it can offer improved capability at a lower cost.

Boeing's design is based on the company's popular 737800 twin-engine airliner, modified with a weapons bay, external hard points under the wings and fuselage, and a tail boom for a magnetic anomaly detector, a device sensor that indicates the presence of a submarine by sensing large ferrous metal objects under the water.

Boeing is offering a mission suite based on the company's system for the Nimrod MRA.4, a remanufactured Nimrod patrol aircraft being developed for the Royal Air Force.

Skepticism among Navy aviation patrol experts about the safety of flying a twin-engine jet on long missions low over the ocean has been an obstacle for the Boeing 737, one Boeing official said. This reluctance inspired Boeing to take a 737 on a November 2003 tour of patrol aviation bases to show the Navy what it could do at low altitude.

Timothy Norgart, Boeing's manager for the MMA program and a former P-3 wing commander, said he is convinced that the reliability of two turbofan CFM56-7B engines - which he called "the most reliable in the world" - is superior to the four turboprop engines on the P-3.