Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/439940
S SHIPBUILDING www.vanguardcanada.com dECEMBER 2014/JanUaRy 2015 23 ished. That was a tremendous selling feature, to be able to prove our ability to take a ship, execute and ensure the end product. The more they looked at our ships and saw what we had done, the more interest they showed." Barker says a fi nal contract will likely be signed in the third quarter of 2015, but already technical teams from Seaspan, Lock- heed and New Zealand (in fact, Thyssen Krupp Marine Systems of Australia) are working on the design requirements and "Ca- nadianizing" the data. That will not only help Lockheed with pricing for production, but also ensure Seaspan has the people, processes and material in place when the fi rst ship arrives in 2016, just as the yard is completing its last Halifax frigate. (Irving Ship- building, which is performing upgrades on the other seven ships, is scheduled to be completed in 2018.) Despite signifi cant differences between the MEKO and Hali- fax frigates, the execution strategy remains the same, Barker said. "Sometimes it is how you start these projects that will determine how you fi nish. So preparation, knowledge of the ships that we are going to be converting, looking at the intricacies and some of what we call the hard spots where we need to have maybe a little different plan – that's critical." He pointed to different confi gurations for cabling and the mast as two examples that will require a change in approach. "We have production people in New Zealand working aboard those ships with the New Zealanders so we clearly understand the product we are getting," he added, noting that the 15-plus hour fl ight between Victoria and Auckland remains one of the more chal- lenging aspects of the project. Canadian content While New Zealand has contracted separately for certain compo- nents of the upgrade and will deploy the Sea Ceptor missile de- fence system, McClure says the ANZAC frigates will share many of the same systems as their Canadian counterparts. "The Halifax-class CMS 330 combat management system is the backbone of the technical solution which will integrate the various legacy and new subsystems," he said. "The New Zealand navy is installing an integrated bridge supplied by Vancouver- based OSI Marine Systems under a previously awarded platform systems upgrade contract. Many of the other sub-systems to be supplied by Lockheed Martin are common to the Halifax-class upgrade, including IBM Canada's data link processing system. Other sub-systems to be supplied by LMC come from eight sepa- rate countries throughout Europe, Israel and Australia." In total, the combat system could involve some 20-30 Canadian suppliers, he said. Most of the hard lessons about systems integration, however, will have been learned on the Halifax ships. "The interface with a particular radar, with an AW system or an IFF (identifi cation, friend or foe) system, even though we are in a world of open architecture, there is a signifi cant amount of work making the software in the command management system work with those particular subsystems, sensors or weapons. On the shipyard side, there are over 60 kilometres of every type of wire and cable, and the process to install and hook up all those systems is quite complex. The teamwork that is required gets better with each ship you do, and if all goes according to plan, it will be right on the tail of the last Halifax-class ship and you'll have the trained people and processes right there ready to go," McClure said. Shipbuilding and submarines may face harsh media criticism in Canada, but both McClure and Barker note that success with the HCM project, the Victoria-class in-service support contract and progress with the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy point to an advanced capability with complex projects. "It says that Canadian industry can do these things and do them on a scale – a 12-ship program is fairly large," McClure said. "All those skill sets, which include highly educated software and sys- tems engineers along with highly trained and experienced techni- cians – that is a whole capability that has been developed in Cana- da and is being recognized as world-class." "One of things that Canada is bringing to the table now is what we call total solution," Barker adds. "We can provide not only the hardware but also the software and the integration. There was a lot of learning that foreign navies have looked at and said, 'we are going to be going through this complex project, is Canada a model that we can use?'" As for future business, Barker believes there are approximately 40 MEKO vessels of a similar vintage to the New Zealand and Ca- nadian frigates working in a dozen smaller navies worldwide. And as those navies meet on an annual basis to discuss the state of their ships, "New Zealand is becoming a very visual example to Chili, to South Africa, to other countries." Factors such as export restrictions, national shipbuilding capa- bility and defence budgets will limit the number of potential cus- tomers, but McClure says they are working with "a list of 10 tar- get countries" likely to proceed with a mid-life upgrade through an international competitive tender. The Canadian Patrol Frigate may not have found any buyers when it was fi rst launched almost two decades ago, but the mod- ernized version now departing shipyards in Victoria and Halifax is drawing increased international attention to the systems integra- tion and production capabilities of Canadian industry. HMCS Vancouver