Air Power: Project Nankeen: A Heron by any other name | ADM Feb 2011
Katherine Ziesing | Canberra
The mission: delivery of a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) capability into Afghanistan in 90 days. The outcome: 3,500 hours flown in the first year with another 6,500-plus planned for 2011. ADM has a look at how Project NANKEEN came together and what the future holds for the ADF’s first operational experience with a medium altitude long endurance (MALE) RPA.
When the Joint Operations Command (JOC) first put out the urgent call for a tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capability for use by the Special Operations Task Force (SOTG) and other Australian forces in Afghanistan in early 2009, it was amazing how quickly the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) moved to make the urgent operational user requirement happen. Within a few weeks, Air Force Headquarters (AFHQ), in conjunction with the major stakeholders, developed options under an integrated project team (IPT).
On September 7 2009, then Defence Minister Senator John Faulkner announced that Defence had signed a lease agreement with MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA) and a Memorandum of Understanding with the Canadian Forces already operating the platform in country. But there was a lot of work behind the scenes to make these two announcements come together.
Earlier, in July of that year, RAAF and Australian Army personnel undertook Heron training in Canada. The cadre Australian Heron crews were trained and ready to deploy to Kandahar within 90 days of Government approval of the AFHQ Project. By August, Australian Heron crews were embedded within the Canadian Heron detachment at Kandahar contributing to ISAF combat operations.
The RAAF-led IPT was just five people, led by Wing Commanders David Riddel and Craig Meighan with the commercial support by the DMO. Thanks to them SOTG, the Mentoring Task Force (MTF) and Combined Taskforce - Uruzgan (CT-U) are now able to count upon a team of people from all three services to provide essential ISR support to operations. But the road was by no means a straight line and involved dealing with multiple agencies and nations to bring the solution together successfully.
“It’s one thing to rent a truck and put it onto the road, but it’s a completely different task to get a complete aviation system into operational service within 90 days - and to do it in a war zone!,” WGCDR Riddel, the IPT leader, told ADM.
Setting the language straight, WGCDR Riddel is also adamant that Heron is an RPA rather than an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) like the Scaneagle, given the relative size and complexity of the aircraft and its payload.
“There are nuances here,” WGCDR Riddel explained. “It is important for people to realise that these systems are not robots or drones - they are aeroplanes operated by trained and qualified aircrew, utilising the aviation risk management processes and working to meet airworthiness requirements developed for manned aircraft.
“We fly at medium and high altitudes, sharing the airspace with other piloted aircraft, and we must comply with the same airspace control orders as manned aircraft. For takeoff and landings at Kandahar, we are mixing the circuit with fighters, helicopters and transports - in fact it is said to be the highest traffic density single runway airfield in the world. I have been there on a number of occasions, and I can attest to unrelenting density of traffic.”
The Heron sits at the 1.2 tonne mark with a wingspan of 16.6 metres and a length of 8.5 metres, compared to the Scaneagle’s wingspan of 3.1 metres and length of 1.2 metres with a weight of less than 20 kilograms. To put that into perspective, some of the sensors on the Heron weigh more than double the Scaneagle as a whole. The Heron is actually larger than a Predator.
“The reality is, to really do a theatre capable MALE ISR and Offensive Air Support mission that Air Force should be doing in the future, we will need to look into an aircraft in the four to five-tonne all up weight arena.”
The current configuration on the Australian Heron has five payloads with another two to three currently under consideration. WGCDR Riddel refused to be drawn on the exact nature of the payloads but EO/IR, communications relays, and datalinks are a big part of the suite. And the host of antennas hanging off the bottom are not for aesthetics either. The mission asked of the Heron means that it is on station for the better part of a 24 hour day - a task where size matters.
Getting started
The RAAF team conducted a rapid market survey to determine viable options, with both manned and unmanned contenders being canvassed in parallel. But when the team started mentioning ‘civilian contractors’ and ‘kill chain’ in the same sentence, it quickly became clear that a undefined level of risk that the organisation as a whole would not be able to accept the concept in the available time. Also, being a guest at Kandahar Airfield meant that space for any new aircraft and support elements was at a premium and obtaining the relevant permission from the various NATO bodies presented a challenge.
The nature of the operational requirement also meant that the team did not have an overwhelming requirement to develop a long term through life support arrangement, as the capability was for operations within Afghanistan for the period of the Service Delivery Contract.
“I believe that there are some lessons that could be learnt here which may be of use for other projects which use pretty much commercially available technology,” WGCDR Riddel told ADM. “With the rapid development of ISR associated technologies, we are in a new paradigm where life of type for a payload or its subsystems may be measured in the terms of a couple of years - if that.
“For example, we are looking at integrating the third generation of video encoder into our intelligence centre in the matter of less than 14 months of operations.
“Each one has worked, however with each upgrade we get more bandwidth available for other activities and less latency. Whilst we maintain a baseline of operations, we need to have an appetite to proactively look forward to trial and integrate capability enhancements to continue the growth of the capability.”
In parallel to the DMO contracted air system, Air Force established the essential intelligence processing, exploitation and dissemination capabilities and operational training systems that are relatively platform agnostic.
“To get a major system into operations without ever even operating it in Australia, you’ve got to have an exemplar,” WGCDR Riddel said. “Fortunately one was available, operated at Kandahar by an organisation that we trusted and respected, and whom had an airworthiness regulatory system similar to ours - the Canadian Department of National Defense (DND).”
In April 2009, the five members of the IPT were in Ottawa to capture the lessons learned in the Canadian program that was barely 12 months old itself.
After the initial positive research period, the Canadian DND and Australian Air Force negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding based on the sharing of human resources and hardware to move forward together.
Australian crews also worked with the Canadian team at Kandahar as their agreement with MDA meant they were contracted for a certain amount of hours per month but they did not have the manpower on the ground to achieve those hours at that stage of their development. With the support of the Australian ‘work experience’ team, they were able to increase their operational hours.
“Whilst we didn’t have an RPA of our own, we were able to develop the operational side of the project - we essentially were able to perform the crawl and walk embedded within the Canadian unit, and were then ready to run when we received our system at Christmas in 2009,” WGCDR Riddel said.
Now that the platform is in service, Australia budgets for a certain amount of hours per month but pays a variable amount dependant on the actual hours flown. There is also a baseline fixed cost.
“It doesn’t matter if we fly one hour or 7,000 hours a year, MDA still have to have people there on the ground,” WGCDR Riddel explained when asked about a ‘power by the hour’ arrangement and the commercial learning curve the Air Force faced.
“When we came back from Canada, we built the business case and the proposal for government consideration,” WGCDR Riddel said. “The small DMO team of three did the commercial work in record time and Air Force stood up a cadre group, mainly from the air combat group (Hornets, F-111s and Hawks), but also personnel that had been working with the BAE Systems HERTI team in South Australia earlier in the year.
“These HERTI guys had essentially been operators of a small MALE and brought their experience with them to the project.”
Team effort
“In terms of who does what in Afghanistan, MDA provides the aircraft in line with the flying schedule that we provide,” WGCDR Riddel explains. “They present the aircraft in a serviceable state for us to fly. They tow it out to the taxiway near the runway and we start it up.
“We fly it and almost a day later, we land it. They accept it as it taxis off the runway, shut it down and tow it away. They also conduct all the maintenance and make sure it’s available when needed.”
While the Heron is not the cutting edge of technology, WGCDR Riddel is more than happy with the craft in terms of its reliability and serviceability.
When one of the Herons was out of action for five months last year after a particularly rough landing, a single platform flew the rest of the year on its own and the Air Force ‘thrashed the life out of it’ and actually increased the level of operations than was previously planned with the two aircraft.
“In comparison with other systems that I have seen, the Israeli system is very dependable and we’re happy with the capability it provides. There’s been extraordinary reliability,” WGCDR Riddel said, confirming that the second aircraft is back on deck and a third should be arriving in a matter of weeks.
A matter of leverage
Within weeks of being stood up, the IPT had leveraged off the intelligence, fighter jet, P-3 Orion, C-130 pilots, F-111 pilots and navigators, surveillance and existing RPA experience of the RAAF and wider Defence community. Risk was addressed through using fighter combat instructors (FCIs) to lead the piloting and mission commander efforts in our first two detachments, with support from all RAAF Force Elements Groups.
While Air Lift Group and the Surveillance and Response Groups are relatively heavily tasked in Afghanistan, Air Combat Group was taking the lead in training Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) and had the capacity to pick up some of the work that Project Nankeen had.
“We have a team of highly trained people who also know how to conduct unarmed offensive air support operations to contribute to the SOTG effort,” WGCDR Riddel said, confirming that the concept of operations was ‘significantly different’ to that of many other Heron operator countries.
“We were able to get all our techniques, tactics and procedures (TTPs) down pretty quickly thanks to the calibre of people we had and embedding with the Canadians early on, before we even started operating the Heron on our own.”
The Australian Heron contingent works predominantly in support of both the J2 and J3 missions (intelligence and operations respectively). This was a different approach to other Heron operators who have been using the Heron capability in purely an ISR role, that is, predominantly a watching task, not having a real time impact to the current engagement.
Current Heron operators in Afghanistan are, of course, the Canadian forces but also the Germans who have also signed a similar lease arrangement, managed by Rhinemetall, in November 2010.
JTACs are able to access the Heron feed directly on their ROVER tablets and are then able to call fire support (artillery, mortars etc) as needed, supported by RAAF personnel well versed in such operations. For more detail on the RAAF contingent behind the scenes on the Heron operation, see the From the Source interview with Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Mark Binskin on P130.
Also different to other Heron operators, the Australians created ground mission station (intelligence facility), developing a high capacity computer network containing a complex geospatial software environment. This was built with the support of contractors KAZ Fujitsu Geospatial Intelligence and Sentient.
“That effort has seen Air Force engage with about 10 different suppliers under about 15 different contracts to develop the systems ourselves in house,” WGCDR Riddel said in explaining how off the shelf components were combined and adapted to the task with the help of DIGO, CDG, CIOG, DSTO, HQJOC and related agencies.
Meeting requirements
“The Heron meets a good majority of the original urgent operational requirements that were set by HQJOC, and we’re improving on that performance regularly,” WGCDR Riddel said. But as someone close to the project pointed out, Heron is but one letter away from heroin – and you always want more. A 100 per cent solution is a far off dream when the goal posts (and technology) keep moving.
“We are doing our best, in terms of trials in Israel and now in Australia of new payloads, with Air Force contracting directly with Heron manufacturer IAI for some of those efforts,” WGCDR Riddel explained to ADM as the issue of including a satcom payload was raised.
“We have been able to effectively operate as a ‘battle lab’ through the incredible ongoing support of various parts of DSTO and CDG. We have combined our ideas of what we want the capability to become with the subject matter expertise of the DSTO scientists to work with IAI and other companies in developing capability enhancements to the existing system.
“Through the direct engagement with IAI, Air Force, supported by DSTO, has achieved an upgrade of the video quality available over the data link as the first phase of a series of planned enhancements.
“It is an exciting time, as the small team that I lead can specify requirements and in a relatively short time working collegiately with many organisations, see the solution deployed. It is giving Air Force the ability to become a smarter customer as we look into potential future Defence Capability Plan projects.
“I do really feel for DMO who are always tasked to catch up to the latest Air Force requirements for the contract with MDA - but this is what has to happen if we are to remain flexible and develop the capability,” WGCDR Riddel said.
The speed of introduction of Air Force’s first operational MALE capability is unparalleled, and although there have been a hiccup or two along the way, the Australian Herons are producing outcomes that other coalition nations in Afghanistan are keeping a close eye on.