WASHINGTON – The U.S. Navy and Normal Atomics in November used sonobuoys dropped from an MQ-9A Block V Reaper to trace a simulated submarine goal on a U.S. Navy Pacific take a look at vary, in what GA says is the primary time an aerial drone has deployed a self-contained anti-submarine warfare system.
The Reaper deployed a mixture of 10 sonobuoys – deployed to measure water circumstances and monitor for targets – then acquired and transmitted the information in actual time to a monitoring station at Laguna Flight Operations Facility situated at Yuma Proving Grounds in California.
The take a look at was a part of the event of the MQ-9B SeaGuardian drone, which is a part of a analysis and growth challenge along with the Navy’s Naval Air Techniques Command. If the Navy could make this idea of operations work, it has the potential to considerably decrease the price of submarine searching and unlock bigger, dearer manned sub-hunting platforms such because the P-8A Poseidon, to behave as a command-and-control platform.
The Reaper managed to amass and observe an expendable anti-submarine warfare coaching goal for 3 hours utilizing Normal Dynamics UYS-505 acoustic processing software program.
In accordance with a Normal Atomics readout of the take a look at, the MQ-9B SeaGuardian could have 4 wing stations accessible to hold as much as 4 sonobuoy dispenser system pods, packing as much as 40 ‘A’ dimension or 80 ‘G’ dimension sonobuoys.
“This demonstration is a primary for airborne ASW. The profitable completion of this testing paves the best way for future growth of extra Anti-Submarine Warfare capabilities from our MQ-9s,” mentioned Normal Atomics Aeronautical Techniques President David Alexander in an announcement. “We look ahead to persevering with collaboration with the U.S. Navy as they discover revolutionary choices for distributed maritime operations within the undersea area.”
Doing airborne anti-submarine warfare is an all-around cheaper technique to do ASW than with a number of P-8As, which price rather more per flight hour, mentioned Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and senior fellow at Hudson Institute who co-authored a latest ASW examine that checked out this idea.
“What it does is it permits now the P-8 doesn’t must be the one factor that delivers the sonobuoys,” Clark mentioned. “So the P-8 can begin to step again to be extra of a [command and control] platform, it doesn’t must service all sonobuoy fields.
“Proper now what has occurred is a P-8 goes out, drops all of the sonobuoys and hangs round burning flight hours whereas it displays the sonobuoy area. And naturally, you’ve bought to have a number of P-8s to have the ability to cowl the world. Whereas with this concept, you would have MQ-9s doing the deploying and the servicing of the sonobuoy area at a a lot decrease flight hour price.”
The limitation is that the P-8As have a a lot bigger capability for sonobuoys, which over massive areas means they’ll nonetheless be necessary, Clark mentioned. However with the assist of drones capable of obtain and course of information, you gained’t have to threat as many P-8As to service the sonobuoy area, making the entire operation cheaper.
“It actually breaks the price construction of the present ASW idea of operations,” he mentioned.