Pilots, Air Battle Managers and Engineer Officers from the Royal Air Force (RAF), United States Air Force (USAF) and US Navy have gained experience on the Royal Australian Air Force’s Boeing E-7A Wedgetail during exercise Pitch Black 2022.
The UK and US personnel have been posted into 2 Sqn RAAF, normally based at Williamtown, to gain experience on the Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) platform prior to the RAF and USAF receiving their own aircraft later in the decade.
The RAF is to receive three E-7s to replace its now-retired E-3D Sentry AEW.1 aircraft and the USAF is looking to acquire up to 30 Wedgetails to replace its ageing E-3G Sentry airframes.
Speaking to ADM at RAAF Base Tindal during the second (Large Force Employment) week of Pitch Black 2022, USAF Major Christopher Dunn explained the reason for his posting to the RAAF’s Wedgetail force.
“They've sent me out here to collect the knowledge [and] use the information that 2 Squadron has already established, because the Australians have been flying this jet for about 15 years now,” he said. “I’ll be taking that corporate knowledge back with us to the US in order to more quickly facilitate standing up our own fifth generation C2 airborne platform, which we're purchasing from Boeing, and using it on our own fleet in order to replace the aging E-3s that we have on station now.”
MAJ Dunn said that he is set to return to the US at the end of his posting in 2024-2025 and will assist the USAF in the standing up of its first Wedgetail squadron in the 2027 timeframe.
Commenting on the differences between the recently upgraded E-3G Sentry in the USAF and the Wedgetail, he said the Windows-based software in the former was easier to use, but learning to operate the 5th generation E-7 – with its Northrop Grumman Multi-Role Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) surveillance radar – is straightforward.
“It's a quick turnaround on learning the system or at least I've found that to be true,” MAJ Dunn explained. “I think right now we're trying to cut it down to a couple months to transition to a whole new airframe. And it's a whole new crew concept. It's much lighter on the crew complement, and so getting the operators from the E-3G to learn how the system itself operates, the ‘green’ part of the 737 aircraft – having to do all the closing the doors, doing the walk round etc is a bit different. But with Boeing Defence Australia’s assistance, learning how to use the system itself is pretty fluid, it's not terribly different.
“We're looking to onboard some more individuals over the next couple of years in order to, again build that cadre that we're going to take back with us to produce our own squadron, across the USAF.”
The RAAF deployed a single Wedgetail and two crews to 2 Sqn’s established Forward Operating Base at Tindal four weeks before the commencement of Pitch Black, to exercise with RAAF and US Marine Corps F-35s and Australian Army units around Curtin Air Base in north west Australia.
During Pitch Black itself, 2 Sqn Detachment Commander Squadron Leader Adam Paull, explained how the Wedgetail was operating with other C2 assets, including a Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) Gulfstream G550AEW and ground-based Control and Reporting Units.
“We only have a number of Blue Air missions throughout the exercise due to the way the rest of the C2s workforce is working up out of Darwin,” he said. “So, because we tend to take a lot more of the airspace control for want of a better term, they're using the ground-based system up in Darwin (the RAAF’s 114 Mobile Control and Reporting Unit) for all the coalition partners to go through. And because of that we tend to do to Red Air missions for this exercise.”
SQNLDR Paull added that the reliability of the Wedgetail platform meant the squadron only needed to deploy a single aircraft to Tindal for the exercises.
“I've only got one aircraft here and there are other aircraft participating in other activities around Australia and the world at the moment,” he said. “It's a very reliable platform, typically we've had up to 98 per cent mission success rate and because of that, we can get away with one aircraft being in rotation at a time.”
An in-depth look at the Wedgetail in RAAF service will appear in the November issue of ADM.
