Sea Power: Kiwi Seasprites expand the envelope | ADM Apr 2011

Nick Lee-Frampton | Wellington

A decade after they entered service with 6 Squadron, Royal New Zealand Air Force, the unit’s five Kaman SH-2G Seasprites have become renowned in several areas, including night operations and hours flown.

“Five years ago we had no night vision goggle (NVG) capability whatsoever,” squadron boss, Commander Jim Tayler, told ADM in late February.

However, a couple of pilots who subsequently joined the squadron at its Whenuapai, Auckland base, had NVG experience and their drive and enthusiasm for the capability proved infectious.

“Now NVG training is part of all crew’s conversion training. We have probably got as good - and in some areas, including embarked operations - better capability than pretty much any other Navy,” said CDR Tayler.

“Certainly we fly using NVGs to the same or better limits than any other Navy. On international exercises the Kiwi Seasprites are generally the ones that get put on the night shift.”

The squadron is leading the way in terms of Seasprite hours too. We have now flown more hours on this variant of the Seasprite than anybody else, said CDR Tayler. Such prowess is not acquired easily; the unit has faced many challenges including those mentioned in the NZ Defence Force Annual Report 2010.

The report describes maintenance woes, shortage of aircrew and mentions that there were only two months during 2009-2010 when more than two Seasprites were available. ADM asked CDR Tayler about the current state of affairs.

“We’re in a steady state. We don’t really have enough resources to do everything we want to do …  although in some areas we have moved forward.”

In some areas, this momentum has raised new challenges: ‘Nobody has flown the Seasprites’ composite blades to the number of hours that we have. We are at the forefront of expending their finite life hours.”

However, says CDR Tayler, there is a ‘light on the horizon.’

“A new organisation, currently being established, is specifically designed to focus on the deeper level maintenance of the aircraft. We did a trial on one of our aircraft before Christmas and we certainly learned a few lessons from that which we are already applying. Certainly we are doing things better than we were a year or two ago.”

The Maintenance Flight Commander, Squadron Leader Mark Waters, outlined the details of the maintenance changes to ADM.

“Essentially we are putting additional focus on the phase maintenance. This is intermediate maintenance, it is not flight-line maintenance, but aircraft in the hangar disassembled to their core and then inspecting for corrosion damage, abnormal wear and tear, parts replaced etc. The new maintenance structure … will take ownership and responsibility for that maintenance.

“Previously the Squadron has done both the operational, flight-line, maintenance plus the intermediate level maintenance and our ability to retain the corporate knowledge of that level of maintenance has been difficult because of personnel being posted out.”

The new maintenance organisation, said SQNLDR Waters, “will be considerably more efficient, because at the moment when we need someone to do a specialist repair on the aircraft we are competing with all the other units for what are fairly limited specialist resources in some areas.

“People were sceptical when the new organisation was proposed but [the trial] proves the concept will work, it just needs the organisation to be put properly in place to make it happen.”

More flying

CDR Tayler said the new system should enable more flying.

“As soon as they remove those competing demands between the flight line and phased maintenance, having to pull people off one to the other, [we] can focus on … getting the aircraft in to the air and not have to worry about resourcing the intermediate servicing.”

However, personnel numbers remain a concern for the squadron.

“I’m still about one and a half crews down from where I would really like to be,” CDR Tayler told ADM. “But once we get more aircraft hours coming and the new maintenance system, we should be able to pick up our training.”

And that training effort requires its own particular level of fleet availability.

“We are still training, but we haven’t really got the capacity at the moment to do much catch-up. We are training at the rate we need to train at the moment, but because we got behind the training last year - because of the lack of aircraft - we haven’t yet got the capacity to increase our training to start [raising] crew numbers. I anticipate that later this year we should start picking up on all these fronts.”

ADM suggested that the maintenance troubles of last year have led to a beneficial outcome rather than a negative, with the holes identified now being addressed in a more coherent manner.

“Oh definitely,” CDR Tayler said. “One of the things that generated the review of the phase maintenance was the time and energy that we as a Squadron were putting in to the depot level maintenance content of the phase, ultimately to the to the detriment of getting the aircraft on to the ships and away to sea.

“Because we were not generating the hours that we needed too, that actually raised the issue high enough to reassess at a high level how we were doing it. We had quite a big win there.”

And industry is also playing a role with the maintenance of the fleet, with the relationship between the operator and OEM Kaman improving over the last few years.

“If you had asked that question two or three years ago it would not be quite so positive [an answer], but over the last couple of years there has been a lot of effort, from both sides, towards improving our relationships and communications,” CDR Tayler confirmed to ADM.

“One of the problems is that we were going through too many intermediaries when talking to the company. Now we have people on the Squadron who speak directly to technical experts at Kaman, so we are getting answers from the horse’s mouth rather than being translated through three or four levels.

“There will always be problems in supporting an aircraft made by a manufacturer on the other side of the world, only I certainly don’t see Kaman being any more of a problem than any other manufacturer. And they have a commitment to keep the aircraft going, which is great news for us.”

ADM asked about the ratio of maintenance to flight hours given the demands placed on the platform at home and at sea.

“Our feeling is that probably over the first six or seven years of the aircraft’s life the ratio of maintenance to flying increased, but that is not really surprising as … any aircraft you put on the back of a ship is going to be high maintenance,’ CDR Tayler said.

“Over the last couple of years we seem to have reached a steady state and in my experience (CDR Tayler has flown Sea Kings, Lynx and Merlins), the maintenance level seems similar.”

“One thing that has changed is our maintenance schedule,” SQDLDR Waters said. “We started off with a 150-hour phase for the aircraft. This was changed a few years ago to a 200-hour phase. That allows us to get more flying in between those higher level servicing periods. It is a continual improvement.”

Weather forecast

What are the weather minima, asked ADM, for launching and recovering at sea?

“It’s variable,” CDR Tayler said. “If you want to put down a blanket based figure for the Anzac frigates I would say about sea state five to six and 50 knots is our wind limit, but that’s actually more about getting the rotor blades spread and the aircraft out of the hangar, rather than flying.

“We operate pretty much down to zero visibility if necessary. Our normal recovery limits are a quarter-mile visibility and 125 foot cloud base. We could go lower than that if we wanted too, using our emergency low visibility approach (ELVA) procedures.”

CDR Tayler added that the Squadron currently has rather more stringent limits when it comes to flying from the Royal NZ Navy’s 1,900-tonne Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPVs) or the 9,000-tonne multi-role ship HMNZS Canterbury.

“That is only because we haven’t yet done the full flight trials on both platforms. So once we get in a position to do those we will increase the limits on both ships.”

He told ADM that in the past the Squadron has operated two Seasprites off HMNZS Canterbury simultaneously.

ADM asked about the demands of flying from a ship in high sea states. Both take-off and landing are equally interesting in their own way, said CDR Tayler.

“We don’t have a simulator that is able to simulate ship operations, so the only way of doing it is to go out and do it for real. That’s one of the reasons that to become a fully qualified, unsupervised, Seasprite pilot takes five to six years because the guys have to have quite a lot of hands-on experience to get on and off the deck in all conditions.

“It is probably marginally harder to land than it is to take-off because getting back on a ship which is pitching and rolling quite a lot, with turbulent air flow coming off the superstructure, never ever becomes routine. It is always the moment when you are working the hardest!”

And luckily, the Seasprite isn’t necessarily in trouble should it suffer hydraulic failure at such a critical point.

“You can fly it with no hydraulic assistance at all. Normally we fly it with hydraulic controls but you can still fly it if you lose all your hydraulic systems.

“So for a helicopter of its size it is completely unique, it will fly without any power assistance. It is comparable to a Sea King to fly but slightly more agile as it is a bit lighter. It is not quite as responsive as some of the more modern, rigid rotor head, aircraft like the Merlin — and the NH90, which I haven’t flown. But for deployed operations it is a very good aircraft.”