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P-3C Orion enters service with German naval aviation
By Stefan Petersen
The altimeter shows 100ft, the motion of the North Sea waves is only 30m below the fuselage. “That is our minimum permitted altitude above water,” says Commander Marc Höner. Concentrating hard, the aircraft commander steers the light grey P-3C Orion with registration number 60+03 towards a cargo ship and pulls it across into a 30 degree turn. The name and port of registry are now clearly visible on the stern of the ship. A camera clicks, the object is documented. “That's how we do it on an operational sortie, for example when we are tasked with looking for a particular ship or naming every cargo ship in a defined area of operation, like Enduring Freedom around the Horn of Africa,” explains Höner, as he brings the four-engined turboprop aircraft back to 2,000ft (600m), the optimum operating altitude for the surveillance radar.
“Sea surveillance” had been written on the briefing room wall at Naval Air Wing 3 (NAW3) “Graf Zeppelin” hours earlier as the designated task for mission 4724. The unit, which is based in Nordholz near Cuxhaven, has only been flying the Lockheed P-3C for one year. The Bundeswehr managed to buy eight of the Orions at a bargain price from the Dutch, who in 2003 had decided to retire its 13 maritime patrol aircraft (MPA) to cut costs. This was a stroke of luck for the German Navy, as its 40-year-old Breguet Br.1150 Atlantics had reached the end of their service lives. Included in the package price of Euro 295 million along with the aircraft and all the associated logistics was the initial training for selected pilots and technicians in Holland. “And they are now training the others in Nordholz,” says Commander Björn Malmus, commanding officer of the Orion squadron.
Mission 4724 is one such conversion training flight, in which the crew numbers are boosted by instructors. Altogether there are 17 men onboard the Orion, which normally flies with an 11-person crew: pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer in the cockpit, a Tactical Coordinator (Tacco) responsible for mission control, an officer responsible for navigation and communication (NavCom), three operators for the surface sensors and two for the underwater sensors, plus an onboard electronics engineer (Inflight Technician) to resolve any problems. While 60+03 scans the surveillance area, training activities are going on at all the consoles of the “flying classroom”.
“I have previously watched him analyse the task and organise the mission, – to check whether the search has been designed in such a way that everything runs smoothly,” says Instructor Tacco Malmus of his student, Lieutenant Nico Abendroth. “Now we are working our way through the operating software, which is the most important thing on the Orion.” Whereas on the predecessor type, the Atlantic, the workstations all functioned separately and it was only possible to obtain an overview of the overall situation after every crewmember had reported his reconnaissance data over the onboard communications system, the sensors in the P-3C are fully networked. “The central computer delivers a complete situation display to every workstation.” According to Malmus, training the crew so that they can use the system without any restrictions is a key stage in the conversion training. As well as the two instructor crews who were trained in the Netherlands, another four P-3C crews have now completed their conversion training as well.
Meanwhile co-pilot Henry Pönisch has taken over in the cockpit. The lieutenant has to gain some tactical experience, learn “to fly as the situation requires”, as Commander Höner puts it. “The art that one has to master in the MPA cockpit is how to act independently even without any direct instructions from the Tacco or NavCom.” 44-year-old Höner, himself an experienced MPA flight instructor with 4,700 flying hours to his name, completed his own conversion training on the Orion in 2005/2006 with the US Navy in Jacksonville, Florida, and even Malmus, who is the same age, has experience of flying the P-3 with the U.S. Navy: between 1995 and 1998 he served as an exchange Tacco in Jacksonville. “That is why I was made the P-3 project officer and captain of the temporary training squadron in Holland,” says Malmus. When Orion flying operations in Nordholz officially commenced on 1 July 2006, he seamlessly took over command of Squadron 1 of NAW3.
The underwater specialists on mission 4724 are getting their fair share too: under the attentive eye of his instructor, the Inflight Technician releases a buoy which will transmit temperature data from the North Sea. “From the temperature and salinity one can assess the sound propagation underwater, which is important for locating submerged submarines,” says Malmus. The AN/AQA-78B acoustic processor of the P-3C is apparently the most modern system on the market. “That puts us back among the frontrunners in anti-submarine warfare.”
A role which Wing Commodore Captain (Navy) Rainer Kümpel, also relishes. “Never before have so many navies in the world operated non-nuclear submarines – so the classic MPA role is by no means obsolete.” However the Orion's APS-137(V)5 radar, which, thanks to its Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) capabilities, permits the surveillance and tracking of overland targets as well, offers additional new possibilities, notably when combined with the built-in satellite communication and the capability of transmitting data and images in real-time via datalink. “We are now thinking about new operational roles, for example supporting land operations,” says Kümpel. “The P-3C has enormous potential. We just have to decide what direction to pursue as we develop it further.”
The commodore, himself a Sea Lynx helicopter pilot, is proud of his unit's achievements during the complex entry into service of the Orion. “An awful lot is demanded of our people to get the system up and running in stable operation. We plan to deploy it for real for the first time at the end of the year.” One P-3C has been earmarked to take part in NATO Response Force NRF 11 in the second half of 2008. “By the end of 2008 we want to be at the stage where four out of the eight aircraft are always operationally ready – three for deployment in the field and one for training.” That will make it possible to conduct a high intensity operation with three aircraft or two deployments running in parallel, one of medium intensity with two P-3C's, and one of low intensity, with one P-3C.
Of the five Orions currently in Nordholz, two to three at the most are operationally ready. The other three are at EADS in Manching, which, as the designated system support company, conducts routine inspections and repairs. Equipping of the aircraft is still under way, the latest addition having been the newly developed AN/ALR-95V2 ESM system for electronic warfare. “Every aircraft can be equipped with each system, but we didn't get enough mission kits from the Dutch to upgrade all eight aircraft to the same standard,” says Malmus. Thus, for example, there are only three sets of sensors for the electro-optical and infrared surveillance of surface targets. “But they are not integrated into the overall system and will be replaced by more modern equipment by 2009.”
As far as mission 4724 is concerned, the human eye is therefore still an essential sensor along with the radar. “Every crewmember is trained as an observer,” says Höner. The two lookout positions at the back of the Orion are constantly manned on missions like this one of up to 12 hours' duration, by operators who are currently away from their consoles. They are watching the vast expanse of North Sea water around them with great concentration as 60+03 suddenly banks again and starts a descent: a new target has been spotted.
From page 46 of FLUG REVUE 9/2007
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