New Zealand Signs Contract To Upgrade Surveillance Aircraft

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yasin_khan

New Member
New Zealand will spend 352 million dollars ($239 million) on upgrading the electronics aboard its six air force P3 Orion surveillance aircraft under a contract signed Oct. 5, the government said.

The upgrade of the first aircraft was due to be completed in 2008 at the Texas base of American firm L-3 IS Communications Integrated Systems, Defence Minister Mark Burton said. Safe Air Ltd in New Zealand will modify the rest.

Under the deal signed by Burton, the Orions will get new radars and electronic sensors, communications and navigation systems, the minister said in a statement.

The Orions patrol New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone, the Southern Ocean and the Ross Sea off the Antarctic coast.


http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=387931&C=airwar

MOD EDIT:WHERE IS YOUR FEED BACK ON THIS TOPIC??
 
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Aussie Digger

Guest
Yep the NZ Government has done wonders again for RNZAf's capability. The original approved project was twice as expensive as this and was approved by the NZ Government.

However they've had a re-think and opted for a much less ambitious upgrade that basically only provides for a comms/navigation upgrade and a surveillance capability upgrade. No actual capablitity to conduct warlike operations. The RNZAF had planned to equip it's P-3K Orions with an anti-ship/Land attack missile to give it's airforce an abiity to conduct anti-shipping and land attack strike missions. Something it lost when the A-4K's were prematurely retired...

The NZ Government now apparently has dropped that idea, and yet again hampered the options the RNZAF can provide to it... A disgraceful situation. What's the point of a surveillance capability if you can't respond to incidents you do DETECT?
 
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nz enthusiast

New Member
Well the New Zeland national party who in 1997 first looked at the ageing orion begain a process of looking at a completely new aircraft, many in the RNZAF believe the nimrod was being looked at or that the orion would be upgraded and given life exstentions and the government would invest in the Us navys P-8 program. But it turns out that as soon as labour gets into power we have to put with a few electronics upgrades. Also the whole original purpose of the orion is a long range anti-sub plane and the NZ p-3ks still have to use the drop the depth charge done the whole, in which a guy at a computer yells at someone when to drop it, they Australians have theres computerised.
In 1997 a RNZAF p-3k orion caught a Tawianese fisheries boat illegally fishing in NZ waters. The fishing boat ignored the Orion and keeped fishing. The orion had no way of threatening the fisheries boat so skyhawks were called in to threaten to bomb the craft, the tawianese fishing boat left New Zeland waters.
So now days with no skyhawks anybody who wants some good fish can come into New zealand waters and just have a big rusty thing annoying them for a while.
 
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Alpha

Banned Member
This topic prompted me to want to ask "Who exactly will New Zealand be conducting surveillance against?" but i got my answer right here

"In 1997 a RNZAF p-3k orion caught a Tawianese fisheries boat illegally fishing in NZ waters. The fishing boat ignored the Orion and keeped fishing. The orion had no way of threatening the fisheries boat so skyhawks were called in to threaten to bomb the craft, the tawianese fishing boat left New Zeland waters.
So now days with no skyhawks anybody who wants some good fish can come into New zealand waters and just have a big rusty thing annoying them for a while"

So they are spending some 352 million dollars, and the only threat they face is some fishermen? :D
 
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Aussie Digger

Guest
A top level surveillance and response capability is essential for any nation who wishes to control the maritime approaches to it's territory, whether the threat is illegal fishering, unauthorised refugees, smugglers of drugs/guns etc or a more traditional military threat, the capabilities needed to identify and possibly respond are nearly identical.

Obviously NZ doesn't face much of a military threat at home, but NZ forces DO deploy away from home occasionally and a latent capability to protect those forces from attack is essential to enable your forces to be able to successfully deploy.

How many people are aware that Indonesian submarines and surface ships threatened the "ANZAC" taskforce off East Timor in 1999? Without an inate ability to defend itself and respond to such provocation that mission could never have succeeded. The only guarantee against such incidents won't occur in the future is a capable anti-submarine/surface combat capability.

A modernised and capable RNZAF P-3K fleet equipped with modern sensors and fire control capability, modern weapons, and good electronic warfare self protection systems would go a long way to ensuring such a capability. Alas it appears a long way off...
 
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EnigmaNZ

New Member
Another reason, a RNZAF Orion with aircrew and support staff have been in the Gulf as part of Operation Enduring Freedom to contribute to maritime indiction operations. In an area where submarines, particulary the smaller variety, abound, and after what happened to Cole and Stark, one would expect the forces one's government send, have top class equipment. A ship couldn't get by us, but a submarine could have. I seem to recall the sensors including anti sub were updated back in the '80's, so at least we aren't using original '60's tech still (fingers crossed)


"On watch: An RNZAF P-3 Orion, its aircrew and support staff,
a total of 40 personnel, are also in the Gulf area as part of
Operation Enduring Freedom to contribute to the Maritime
Interdiction Operation there."
 
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ILIAD

New Member
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned TGR Helicorp's Snark UAV with respect to surveillance....
 
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Jason_kiwi

New Member
They MAY be getting a anti surface capibility. So they could knock down a few ships. Why didn't they just drop a Torp, that would take it out. With the new upgades and armament of torps and possibly missiles, they would be great. Pretty much a slow moving skyhawk.lol
 
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EnigmaNZ

New Member
The Mk46 torpedo has a range of about 10 Km Jason, thats well inside a lot of SAMs carried onboard naval vessels, and it is designed to sink deep diving submarines, not sure how it would fare against a surface target as far as the sensors go. It is also going to take up to 9 minutes to get to the target position, by which time the ship has moved and deployed decoys. If the ship heads away at flank, say 30 knots, it is going to be 4 to 6 Km from where it was when you launched, the torpedo will not make contact with the target, so you'd have to bring the aircraft in very close, exposing it to the inner defence layers, a certain suicide mission. Now if it was a Russian heavyweight wake homing torpedo, like the Type 53-65KE, designed to sink carriers, it may be another story :D
 
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nz enthusiast

New Member
There was air to surface missile in consideration for the P-3 orions, but the idea got dropped when they saw how much it was going to cost (about 200 million extra for all the weapons upgrades). The idea for a missile armed P-3 is good but the type of government we have now doesn't want to throw money for weapons around to much. Whenver the P-3 replacement comes it will probably have anti-ship missile capability.
 
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nz enthusiast

New Member
They have already considered it, that defence review you are probably referring to is the ones done in 2000 and 2003, cabinet has decided since then the anti shipping capability is just to expense and just structual and electronic upgrades are appropriate.
 
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nz enthusiast

New Member
Attack helis was a part of the NZ first policy but it seems to have disappeared lately. Attack helis are actually rather useless, only good when you got fighters to go with them. When they revaluated NZ air coombat capability in 1997 they mentioned that anti shipping would be essential if we decided to keep air combat capability, and that if the government choose attack helicopters they should also armed the P-3s with anti-shipping missiles. I doubt the current labour government will do either.
 
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Aussie Digger

Guest
I think an ARH would be quite useful for the New Zealand Army. It would add quite a bit of punch to what amounts to otherwise a fairly lightweight force and provide the only "long range" precision strike capability the NZDF would possess. (They currently have none).

It need not be a Tiger or Apache type capability, as the Labor pollies would probably baulk at that anyway, (due to the aggressiveness of it as much as the cost). Something like the US Army's planned ARH (ie: the Kiowa Warrior replacement) should be reasonably affordable and provide an aerial fire support capability. Such a platform could still provide a Hellfire/Rocket/Gun capability for fire support tasks and the RNZAF might even be able to use the same platform as their new training helo, to save on costs, logistics etc.

The recce capability would also be very welcome as the NZDF currently has no tactical air recon capabilities at present either, other than their transport helo's and that is a fairly rudimentary capability to say the least...

Obviously such a helo would be limited in it's use-ability where there was a high level aerial threat (ie: fast jets) to face, but then that goes for pretty much all the NZDF these days anyway...
 
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EnigmaNZ

New Member
The government was looking at second hand Eurocopter Ecureuil AS550U-2 Fennec from Singapore at one point, 10 were fitted to fire TOW, 10 carried rocket pods / machine guns only. But nothing came of it, pity, would have been a cheap close air support capacity upgrade.
 
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myspy

New Member
I have see on the TGR website that their Snark UCAV has the capability to fit and fire the AGM65 Maverick. Do you think that NZ defence has considered this option? It can also operate as an advanced air defence platform (see AIM9 in photos) and a ground attack version. If they decided to go with a unmanned helo it would save the costs of training pilots ad they could even be launched from frigates.
 
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