chetak wrote:MR generally operates on the quiet.
At 30,000 ft it will paint on many radars and be reported, not necessarily by enemy radars with evil intent but on many civil ones too. AI pilots are tasked very often to monitor for "traffic" when they are over certain oceanic areas of "interest" depending on intelligence reports or previous sightings. Likewise, the chinese and paki commercial pilots will also have similar instructions. Add friendly islamic airlines from paki pasand gelf friends into the mix. That's a lot of radars and eyeballs out to get you. Not to forget "busy" merchant ships on "innocent" passage as the pakis and the chinese as well as us will seed the waters with such assets.
- Typical range for primary ATC radar at major airports is less than 100 nm. The P-8I crew will probably need to keep that in mind in the vicinity of Colombo & Male. The Pak coast will already be covered by military surveillance radars as well as AEW&C aircraft. Also, radar emissions will be picked up by the aircraft's ESM gear before it gets 'painted'.
- Commercial traffic tends to shut down in war-zones. But even if that isn't the case, the 737 is a ubiquitous model and from a distance an IN P-8 is indistinguishable from civilian aircraft at cruise altitude. But a 737 loitering under 10,000 ft on the high seas will immediately be tagged as a military type.
- Same applies to merchant shipping. A 737 at 30,000 ft is an unremarkable sight. One at low altitudes is probably doing something 'interesting'.
Normal merchant shipping navigation radars which will be on 24x7 at sea can work wonders as surveillance radars when manned by the right crews.
Again, the P-8's ESM kit will have tagged these emitters long before the aircraft itself is detectable, giving the crew ample time to steer clear.
Another advantage of flying higher is the far larger field of view for the aircraft's radar & ESM allowing for superior situational awareness against both regular hostile forces as well as unconventional threats of the kind you've mentioned.
During war, all ops including transit, will be low level except when a surface target is confirmed and tactics indicate a higher launch height. It will pop up, launch and get down quickly and get the hell away.
Much safer at lower levels than tooling around at height.
In IOR the IAF & IN will dominate the skies for the forseeable future. Any time the aircraft flies near contested airspace (in proximity to the Pakistani coast for example) it'll do so behind a fighter screen.
Basically, between the south of Mumbai and west of Great Nicobar it should be able to function more or less with impunity for at least a decade. The only real threat to the IN is from PN SSKs and missile boats and PLAN SSKs & SSNs. If on the other hand, a major PLAN task-force is dispatched to the IOR, we'll have plenty of warning and there's no reason the P-8s won't be able to steer clear.
The P-8 air frame is stressed for sustained low level flight and maneuver, unlike it's commercial cousins. This has been done for a reason. It has a considerable weight penalty too.
If it was just an occasional yank and bank at low level and the rest of the time was spent at 30,000 ft, a commercial air frame would have done just dandy. Cheaper to fly and also cheaper to maintain too.
The flip side is... if they were going to fly the P-8 like a P-3, they'd have opted for the same upgraded platform (Orion 21 offered by LM); turboprops + straight high aspect wings. It would have been cheaper to fly and would have had better range & maneuverability (in that flight profile).
They also wouldn't have been developing gear to enable the aircraft to engage submarines from higher altitudes.
Boeing to equip Navy's new P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft for high-altitude ASW
Boeing engineers will upgrade the P-8A with high-altitude ASW weapons and sensors, as well as enable the aircraft to perform guided weapons in-flight target updates, retargeting, weapon hand-off, and bomb impact assessments over the Link-16 tactical radio network.
Among the upgrades Boeing will perform is to equip the P-8A aircraft with torpedoes that can be released from altitudes as high as 30,000 feet. These high-altitude torpedoes are Navy Mark 54 lightweight torpedoes with add-n kits that enable the weapons to glide through the air to attack enemy submarines from long ranges.
Last year the Navy authorized Boeing to start building the add-on kits as part of the High Altitude Anti-Submarine Warfare Weapon Capability (HAAWC) Air Launch Accessory (ALA) program. Aircraft normally release conventional torpedoes from very low altitudes.
The HAAWC ALA turns the Raytheon Mark 54 torpedo into a glide weapon that the P-8A aircraft can release from high altitudes. As the flying torpedo reaches the water, it jettisons wings and other air-control surfaces and takes on its original role as a smart torpedo that can detect, track, and attack enemy submarines autonomously.
BAE Systems to develop MAD ASW drone to help Navy P-8A find submarines from high altitudes
Officials of the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Arlington, Va., announced an $8.9 million contract this week to the BAE Systems Electronic Systems segment in Merrimack, N.H., for the High Altitude ASW (HAASW) Unmanned Targeting Air System (UTAS) program for the Navy Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol jet.
HAASW UTAS seeks to integrate a magnetic anomaly detector (MAD) and algorithms for use on an air-launched drone that the P-8A will use to detect and pinpoint enemy submarines.
Also,
Navy’s P-8 Sub Hunter Bets On High Altitude, High Tech; Barf Bags Optional
The Navy’s jet-powered P-8 Poseidon patrol plane boasts plenty of advances over the P-3 Orion turboprops it will replace, but for the sensor operators the favorite feature will be very basic: They won’t throw up as much.
The P-3’s notoriously rough ride at low altitudes and the gunpowder-like stench from the launch tube shooting sonar buoys out the back meant that, “typically, every mission or two you’d have somebody get sick [and] start throwing up into their air sickness bag,” said Navy Captain Aaron Rondeau, a P-3 veteran who now runs the P-8 program. “We haven’t seen that much with the P-8.”
With its more modern and less rigid wing, “it’s a much smoother ride than the P-3,” Rondeau explained, and the buoys are now launched by compressed air, without the old system’s stink. And that just means, he said, that “If your aircrews aren’t sticking their heads in barf bags, they can do their missions better.”
Not everyone really cares whether the operators barf in the back and believe in the P-8’s higher-altitude approach. “I don’t think it will work as well,” noted naval expert Norman Polmar said bluntly. “It’s rather controversial.”
In particular, after some waffling back and forth, the Navy decided to leave off a sensor called the Magnetic Anomaly Detector (MAD), which can detect the metal hulls of submarines — if the plane flies low enough. MAD was crucial to the P-3’s traditional low-altitude tactics. Significantly, the P-8 variant that Boeing is building for the Indian Navy will still have it; only the US Navy P-8 will not. Both Rondeau and Boeing argue that the P-8 can more than compensate with more sophisticated sensors and by using its superior computing power to interpret their data.
So with the P-8, the Navy is not just replacing a sixties-vintage propeller plane with a more modern jet, derived from the widely used Boeing 737. It’s also betting on new technology to enable a high-altitude approach to both long-range reconnaissance and hunting hostile submarines.
Traditional “maritime patrol aircraft” like the P-3 spend part of their time at high altitude but regularly swoop down, sometimes as low as 200 feet above the waves, to drop sonar buoys, scan for subs with the magnetic anomaly detector, launch torpedoes, and simply eyeball unidentified vessels on the surface. But jets like the P-8 are significantly less fuel-efficient at low altitudes than turboprops like the P-3.
“There’s a misconception,” said Rondeau. “Some people think that that means P-8 can’t do low-altitude anti-submarine warfare [ASW]. We can, and it’s very effective down low, [but] we will eventually get to the point where we stay at higher altitudes.”
For some of the new sub-hunting technologies, Rondeau argued, going higher actually gives you a better look. Today, for example, one key tool is a kind of air-dropped buoy that hits the water and then explodes, sending out a powerful pulse of sound that travels a long way through the water and reflects off the hulls of submarines, creating sonar signals that other, listening-device buoys then pick up. (The technical name is Improved Extended Echo Ranging, or IEER). Obviously, an explosive buoy can only be used once, and the sonar signal its detonation generates is not precisely calibrated. So the Navy is developing a new kind of buoy called MAC (Multistatic Active Coherent), which generates sound electronically, allowing it to emit multiple, precise pulses before its battery runs down.
“It will last longer and you’re able to do more things with it,” Rondeau said. And because a field of MAC buoys can cover a wider search area, he said, “we need to stay up high… to be able to receive data from all these buoys and control all these buoys at the same time.”
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