Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/111458
NExT-GEN FIGHTER N ice; an airplane that can land at slow speeds so that it doesn't use a lot of runway to stop; and an airplane that has a lot of endurance and range. When you fly missions from remote places like Inuvik, there is a point where you realize you are committed to landing there, so woe forbid if a storm moves in or the weather is worse than predicted. You are sometimes forced to deal with the situation and land on whatever Mother Nature is delivering you at that moment. I've literally waited airborne while they plowed a one-truckwide length down the middle of the runway so I could land. You need endurance to do the mission, endurance to wait, the range to be able to go somewhere else if needed, as well as robust landing gear and a twin-engine design to handle these extreme conditions. The CF-18 has handled this mission exceptionally well but the Super Hornet will improve upon that capability in so many ways. A single-engine design that lands at high speed is a huge step in the wrong direction for Arctic ops – no doubt about it. Q Are there other aspects to the NORAD mission that suggest specific requirements? You no longer operate alone. It is an interoperable game where it's important that the airplane work with whoever is on the ground or at sea whether it is the army, the navy, or the coast guard to fulfill the mission. The data link systems we have now and the amount and type of data that we are able to pass wasn't even possible a decade ago. Interoperability has been a key piece of navy requirements and part of the Super Hornet design. There has been some argument about what is interoperability: the interoperability that has to exist is a language among army, navy, air force and coast guard airplanes; it is not going to be dictated by a company. It will be dictated by the services that will agree on a common language. The protocols to share communications, data, imagery and radar information need to be common to everybody. So the notion that the JSF will be the only aircraft interoperable and others aren't is ridiculous. Everyone from UAVs to navy ships, fighters and tankers will all be nodes on the net. Q Switch to the expeditionary role. How does the Super Hornet measure up to near-term and projected competition? Again, look at the U.S. Navy: they could end up anywhere in the world at any time in any conflict. If that is not a full time expeditionary role, I don't know what is. So they need a Swiss army knife with wings that can do virtually every mission. The Super Hornet is a multi-mission, multi-role fighter that can operate virtually anywhere. I have heard from pilots who are flying the missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere that the Super Hornet is fulfilling all of the mission requirements. They are working with the army, with the navy or whomever is on the ground. They're passing data and images and video. Pilots are taking off on missions only to learn 15 minutes later that the mission has changed. Without having to land, they're getting video sent to the cockpit, connecting with different people on the ground, receiving a bombing assignment, annotating the picture and asking, "this window or that window?", sending it back to the person on the ground, and then delivering a small bomb literally through a window of an en- emy hiding place from a point where troops were hunkered down nearby. For many reasons I have become a fan of the F-model twoseat Super Hornet because of stories where pilots are flying with a mixed load of weapons and their mission is changed or there is a delay and they've had to go get gas, and then while at the tanker they've received a new mission or a call for help on the ground. If you're getting gas, that requires the pilot's full attention. But the person in the back seat of the F model has been able to communicate with the people on the ground, trade images, circle targets, put in the coordinates, and seconds after the pilot disconnects the airplane is rolling in on a target. With a single seat, that process to "get back in the game" would take minutes or dozens of minutes. There is so much information F/A-18F Super Hornet flowing through that airplane now. You're a node in the network. The AESA radar is 10 times the radar I flew with in the CF-18. With the AESA radar, you can have the plane operate in air-to-air mode and air-to-ground mode at the same time. So if you are busy prosecuting air-to-air targets and also trying to draw a map on the ground and target enemy forces, it would be akin to talking on two cell phones at the same time while driving. Given the way things have evolved with technology and data and images, offloading some of that work to the rear-seat person has proven to be pretty effective with the navy. It's not a surprise to me that Australia purchased all F models. I think it is only a matter of time before more UAVs enter the space and we are interoperating with them as well. And now you're maybe controlling UAVs from the back seat – talk about a force multiplier. People say the Super Hornet is old and it makes me laugh. The stuff I've been working on and the stuff the company is developing, like the Large Area Display where the cockpit displays and the displays in the back have turned into a monster iPad, is cutting edge. The things that we are working on for future mission computer updates are as revolutionary as anything out there. www.vanguardcanada.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2013 19