Navy Moves Toward Goal of More Surveillance With Fewer Aircraft

By RICHARD R. BURGESS
Managing Editor

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 life-cycle operational and maintenance costs.

The keys to these prospective achievements are a next-generation 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 turboprop 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 P-3C 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 737-800 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.

Jack Crisler, Lockheed Martin’s manager for MMA business development, said the turboprop PW150 on his entry is “50 percent more responsive than a turbofan engine,” pointing out a low-altitude advantage of turboprop engines in being able to accelerate more quickly than jet engines.

The Lockheed Martin design features the bomb bay of the P-3, which already is certified for current ordnance. The weapons bay on the 737 will need to be tested and certified for ordnance deployment.

Both planes are designed to be refueled by aerial tankers.

Lockheed Martin is building its MMA mission suite based on its experience with the Aircraft Improvement Program (AIP) version of the P-3C, first deployed in 1998. Equipped with long-range electro-optic sensors and AGM-84E Standoff Land-Attack Missiles (SLAMs, now being replaced by AGM-84K SLAM-ERs, or Expanded Response versions of the missile), the AIP system has been heavily used by combatant commanders in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

Lockheed Martin plans to assemble the MMA at its facilities in Palmdale, Calif., where many P-3Cs were built before the production line shifted to Marietta, Ga. Although some manufacturing equipment would have to be moved to Palmdale, the MMA would not be built in the same way as the P-3C, Crisler said. The Vought Aerostructures unit of Dallas-based Vought Aircraft Industries Inc. would be subcontracted to manufacture many of the MMA’s structures using new technologies and materials, Crisler said.

Boeing plans to build the MMA at its airliner production plants in Washington. The company has built a systems integration laboratory in Kent, Wash., where it will develop and test the aircraft mission system, including consoles and open systems architecture.

Total Navy expenditures on the MMA in 2003 through 2005 are estimated at $633 million. The $4.45 billion allocated to the plane from 2006 through 2009, plus billions more in later years, make this one of the service’s larger aircraft programs.

The contract to be awarded June 6 will include the production of five development aircraft. Initial deployment of the aircraft is scheduled in 2013. The Navy intends to buy 108 MMAs, including eight to be purchased in 2009, the first year of low-rate initial production.

Meanwhile, the service will continue reducing its fleet of P-3Cs, which numbered 227 aircraft until just a few months ago. That number is being cut to 148 over the next year, including up to 84 AIP versions.

Hewitt also said the Navy has asked combatant commanders to help it to “husband our [AIP] fleet,” by reducing mission requirements, and that the AIP mission simulators are being made more realistic to assume more of the training load. Shifting more training to simulators will reduce the need for training during actual flights, therefore preserving the fatigue life of the AIP P-3Cs.

The Navy has not yet decided, Hewitt said, whether the MMA will replace the multisensor P-3Cs flown by the service’s two special-projects patrol squadrons. These squadrons, equipped with approximately five P-3Cs each, conduct a wide spectrum of research and intelligence collection on targets of high interest.