Air Power: Heron in Woomera this year | ADM Feb 2011

Katherine Ziesing | Canberra

A Heron detachment is deployed for roughly four to five months, with significant crossover between personnel to avoid knowledge gaps in training. Thanks to the urgent operational nature of the project, addressing the training element has been a key issue for the Air Force.

“All the courses up until this point have been run overseas,” Wing Commander David Riddel, the Air Force Project Nankeen integrated project team leader, said. “This is just ab initio training. In some respects, for the Heron pilots and payload operators, it’s pretty much like World War One where the fighter pilots were given a handful of hours and then sent to mix it with the Red Baron.

“We knew the problem from the start that whilst the contractor provided training made the crew ‘safe solo’, there was no operational conversion or tactics instruction, no mission rehearsal. Normally a country would fly the system at home for maybe a year or two to develop an actual capability that could possible be deployed on low tempo operations - we did not have this luxury. 

“Our risk mitigation was to embed with the Canadians in the first instance, and to utilise the leadership of fighter combat instructors in our initial formative phase,” WGCDR Riddel said.

Although other countries, such as Israel, don’t use rated aircrew to operate their unmanned air vehicles, the RAAF felt much more comfortable using established and experienced pilots for their first foray into operating a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA). There are plans afoot to also make use of the Air Combat Operator (ACO) community as Heron pilots further down the track as the project matures and the operational airworthiness requirements normalise.

By the end of 2011, WGCDR Riddel expects that the Australian Herons will have flown a total in excess of 10,000 hours in combat operations in Afghanistan. In order to make this happen, training efforts will be expanded this year to push more personnel through.

“Number 5 Flight is the Air Force unit which was stood up in January 2010 to establish the raise-train-sustain of the deployed Heron capability,” WGCDR Riddel outlined to ADM.

5FLT is within the 82 Wing and Air Combat Group command structure, and is located at RAAF Base Amberley.  Due to initiatives commenced in September 2010, 5FLT will be enabled to conduct full immersion operational upgrade training of all ADF staff selected for a Heron rotation to Afghanistan after the completion of the pilots and payload operators’ ‘ab initio’ training on the air system provided by MDA, and prior to deployment. 

Air Force is in the final stages of developing a synthetic environment which brings the pilots, payload operators, geospatial imagery analysts, intelligence operators, network system administrators and other personnel together to conduct mission rehearsal.

“Additionally, MDA has reiterated its plans to bring a Heron system to Australia, initially at Woomera, to further develop the training capability of Heron crews and those who will be on the ground in Afghanistan utilising the outputs of the system,” WGCDR Riddel said. “This will be the first non-experimental operational RPA to be operated in Australia by Air Force.”

“Bringing the Heron to Woomera gives us a greater ability to conduct mission rehearsal exercises with Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs),” WGCDR Riddel explained to ADM. “At the moment, the first time a JTAC gets to use their ROVER tablet with Heron support is in theatre.

“In Afghanistan, every hour is a precious hour; you don’t want to use it for training. That should be done here in Australia before you deploy - it’s what happens for other systems. Bringing the Heron to Woomera is the first step in that process.”