With many countries facing fiscal crunches, aerial surveillance solutions that meet budgetary constraints or leverage more out of existing assets are being increasingly offered by smaller companies. Meanwhile, bigger companies are offering scalable solutions and various financing options. The IQPC-organized Maritime Domain Awareness and Coastal Surveillance Conference and Exhibition held in December in Kuala Lumpur, saw participation from  large OEMs such as Saab, Thales, Airbus and Hawker Pacific along with smaller companies such as Airborne Technologies, Aerodata, Dexata and Tecnam.

Geoff Van Hees, director of marketing and sales, Saab Asia Pacific, said the company’s offer of scalable aerial surveillance platforms took into account the fiscal constraints faced by countries globally. He promised customers could have their platforms scaled according to their current fiscal situation and then build upon them with later additions as further funding became available. He added that Saab offered a comprehensive package, with a strong relationship with Swedish banks and finance companies that could offer a wide scale of payment options. He also pointed to Saab’s expertise in integration work including both existing in-service platforms and the building of integrated command-and-control networks. Van Hees cited in particular Saab’s recent work in Thailand, where the Royal Thai Navy flagship H.T.M.S. Chakri Naruebet and Naresuan class frigates H.T.M.S. Naresuan and H.T.M.S. Taksin are datalinked to the Royal Thai Air Force’s Gripen fighters and Saab 340 AEW aircraft.

  With components and systems becoming lighter and smaller, removable pod-mounted systems have become viable for existing aircraft. Aerodata’s Octopod and Airborne Technologies’s Self Contained Aerial Reconaissance (SCAR) pod were two such systems presented at the exhibition. The Octopod is a 400-kg (880-lb) belly mounted configurable pod that can be carried on a number of aircraft, including the Beechcraft King Air 200, 250 and 350 series; Bombardier Dash 8 Q200, Q300 and Q400 series; Bombardier Challenger 605; Saab 340; DeHavilland Twin Otter; and Embraer ERJ140 and ERJ145. This makes it a cost effective surveillance solution for countries which already have such aircraft in service already.

Dr. Helmut Winter, mission systems and avionics project manager for Aerodata, said the pod could also be mounted on other aircraft types subject to the ground clearance of the belly. He added that by using a pod, only minor modification was required on the aircraft, saving time compared to the extensive reconfiguration work required when installing integral surveillance systems on the aircraft fuselage.

On the side of the scale is Airborne Technologies’ SCAR pod, which is designed to fit onto aircraft hard points and carrying up to 160 kg (just over 350 lb) of payload. George DeCock, Airborne Technologies’s SCAR pod and sensors head, said that the advantages of the pod include its cost effectiveness. Its ability to be easily removable and installed within 15 minutes meant that a customer did not have to buy pods for every aircraft. Instead it is possible to tailor the number according to mission requirements and aircraft availability rate. In contrast to purpose-designed aircraft, the SCAR pod can be transferred to another aircraft if the one assigned to the mission becomes unavailable due to a maintenance issue.  

The ability to mount the SCAR pod on light aircraft, such as the Pilatus PC-9 turboprop single and helicopters such as the Aerospatiale Gazelle, makes it an attractive ISR option for countries with limited budgets but who need an aerial ISR capability.

Flight Tracking Solutions

The MH370 incident in 2014 illustrated the need not only for better flight tracking awareness but also the ability to analyze tracking data in real time. Dexata of Australia displayed its Horus ISR Deep Analytics tool, which is designed to meet this need. Dexata’s director of sales engineering Boris Novak said the Horus system is designed to provide the ability to filter through real-time surveillance systems’ tracking data, allowing known movement track patterns, such as scheduled civilian flights, to be filtered out to allow abnormal movement tracks–such as unidentified aircraft or flights deviating from their normal movement patterns–to be more visible.

The system also provides 3-D visualization of the terrain and movement above it, providing a better picture of the search area, allowing those in the control centers to be aware of terrain obstacles that may hinder line of sight for units directed to the area. It also includes playback capability and can record user actions in regards to classification of tracks and action taken, thus allowing any post-mortem to know exactly the chain of events. This is in contrast to manually written logs, which are susceptible to having no entries made or, in the worst cases, falsified. The Horus system is continuously evolving, constantly updating its pattern library as time goes on.

AIN spoke with the head of the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA), Admiral Ahmad Puzi Abdul Kahar, at the exhibition. He gave an update on the MMEA’s future acquisition plans for its air wing. The wing currently comprises two Bombardier 415s, three Finmeccanica (AgustaWestland) AW139s and three Airbus Helicopters AS365 Dauphins. Admiral Puzi said he was hoping to get funding from the MMEA for an additional Bombardier 415 and six medium-lift helicopters. He also said that the the single MMEA Bombardier 415 deployed to Indonesia in October to combat the forest fires was more effective than other aircraft because it could scoop up water rather than needing to return to the airbase. It’s ability to fly safely at lower altitudes also made it far more effective.

Admiral Puzi said that six medium-lift helicopters would provide greater passenger-carrying capability than its current helicopters, enhancing its ability to rescue passengers from large ships such as cruise liners and ferries. He added that the medium-lift helicopters would also be needed for deploying larger numbers of the MMEA’s Special Task and Rescue teams.

Saab Pushes Maritime Data Fusion

Best known for its airborne platforms, Saab’s experience in the maritime domain is sometimes overlooked. But it has delivered more than 20,000 transponders and 2,000 base stations for the Automatic Identification System (AIS) that monitors and tracks the movement of vessels. And it has developed a suite of applications that merges data from multiple sensors and presents it to maritime surveillance operators in meaningful ways.

In a presentation to IQPC’s previous MDA conference, held in Singapore in November 2014, Saab regional sales manager Mattias Wagman noted that the coastal surveillance systems of many countries were incomplete, and featured little integration of sensors such as AIS, radar and video. Some of this was due to conflicts of interest between civilian and defense stakeholders, he added. And yet maritime threats are escalating, from unauthorized immigration to illegal fishing, and from piracy to pollution.

But, according to Wagman, the creation of a common Recognized Maritime Picture (RMP) is within reach of most nations. In another presentation, to the IQPC ISR conference in London last March, Saab engineer Torkil Nilsson described how the company has created track data fusion engines that apply Bayesian inference principles to present the most reliable ID information to operators. Normal shipping routes are loaded into a ‘Situation Detector’ that learns over time to display alerts when vessels deviate from their usual trajectories. In this display of ship traffic in the Baltic, the red track is a ship whose captain fell asleep at the wheel.

Another Saab official told AIN that Thailand was “very happy with the maritime data fusion that we provided. Not many nations have that.” Saab sold Thailand a package comprising not only Gripen fighters and its 340 AEW aircraft, but also tactical data links and C4I systems. It continues to market the Saab 340 and 2000 airframes as maritime surveillance aircraft, the latter named the Swordfish. – C.P

Airbus DS Keeps Closeye on the Western Med

Airbus Defence and Space has also developed network integration for maritime surveillance. The company was selected to securely link aircraft, ships and the National Coordination Centres (NCCs) of Italy, Portugal and Spain, that were all equipped with different communication systems.

Project Closeye has created “a systems of systems,” program manager Manuel Barriopedro told the Airbus DS in-house magazine On Air. “When the end users saw how it worked, they said they had been looking for a solution like this for years. The new communications system works so well that we proposed to expand it to include different assets from several countries, and extend it to integrate unmanned aerial systems (UAS).”

A typical operation illustrated by the magazine shows a CN235 maritime patrol aircraft operated by Spain’s Guardia Civil detecting a boat of illegal immigrants in distress. Using new radar imaging modes, the air crew classifies the target and sends the information to an NCC by available communications such as Inmarsat, Ku- or X-band satellites. At the NCC, an operator creates a mark in the Common Tactical Situation Picture (CTSP). Immediately, two patrolling ships from the Guardia Civil and the Icelandic Coast Guard (on deployment to the Western Mediterranean in this case) can see the target on their CTSP terminals. As the CN235 moves closer to the target, it streams EO/IR frames and video to the network, which additionally allows all the participants to ‘chat’ in real time. The NCC operator coordinates the interception of the boat. – C.P.