A senior official with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) has offered some insight into how the service plans to deploy its future fleet of manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft.
Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium in Denver, Colorado on 4 March, Major General Chris McKenna said Ottawa’s new assets will be focused on oceanic reconnaissance.
“You can imagine we are a maritime country with three oceans,” McKenna said. “So we need to surveil the maritime domain.”
To achieve that, Ottawa plans to acquire a mixed fleet of maritime patrol aircraft consisting of at least 14 Boeing P-8A Poseidon twinjets and 11 unmanned General Atomics Aeronautcial Systems MQ-9B SkyGuardians.
Deliveries of both aircraft types are expected to begin before the end of this decade.
McKenna says the two platforms will work together collaboratively, with the unmanned, long-endurance MQ-9Bs conducting broad surveillance of Canada’s more than 200,000km (124,000 miles) of coastline – the longest of any country in the world – and proximal waters.
Notably, the UAVs will focus on domestic operations, rather than supporting overseas deployments.
“Initially when we ordered these aircraft, I think our view was more expeditionary than domestic use,” McKenna says. “I would say that’s flipped due to strategic changes and we are now looking at much more Arctic use.”
The P-8As, which carry a crew of nine personnel, advanced sensors and anti-ship/anti-submarine weapons, will be used to investigate specific threats identified by the MQ-9B fleet, such as a suspicious ship approaching Canadian waters.
Canada currently operates 14 Lockheed Martin P-3 Orion patrol aircraft, locally designated the CP-140 Aurora.
McKenna, who oversees the Canadian sector of the bi-national North American Defense Command (NORAD), says this two-pronged approach to maritime surveillance will allow the RCAF relieve its P-8As from the monotonous and time consuming task of broad open water searching.
“It really leverages you to take your exquisite P-8s and put them on targets that require a long-range kill chain,” he notes.
A unique challenge for Canada’s surveillance fleet is operating at extreme northern latitudes above the Arctic Circle, even as far north as the North Pole.
“I have landmass to 83 degrees north and contiguous waters to [90],” McKenna notes, referencing Canada’s high latitude polar territories. The Arctic Circle lies at roughly 66.5 degrees north.
In particular that could pose a challenge to MQ-9B operations, which rely on a satellite data links to maintain communication with remote operators thousands of kilometres away. Those linkages traditionally experience reduced performance in the polar regions.
McKenna recounts a previous test run by manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI), which sought to establish the northern limit of that satellite link by flying an MQ-9 due north from the continental USA through Canada.
“It’s around 70 [degrees],” he says. “And then it gets a little autonomous and spins around and comes south.”
McKenna was apparently referencing a September 2021 test event, in which General Atomics launched a company-owned MQ-9 from North Dakota and reached Haig-Thomas Island just above the 78th parallel. This is deep inside Canada’s Arctic territory, but still short of the far northern region specifically noted by McKenna.
The flight covered more than 3,950nm (7,320km) over a priod of 25.5h.
General Atomics on 5 March pushed back on the description of 2021 test flight head in Denver, telling FlightGlobal the MQ-9 in that event ”was safely under consistent command and control of the GA-ASI crew for the duration of the flight”.
”This was both GA pushing the limits of what was possible, but also understanding that, as the world leader in UAS, we want our aircraft to be the best, and that includes being able to fly anywhere,” said C. Mark Brinkely, senior director of strategic communications at GA-ASI. “We know that is important to our customers and it is certainly important to Canada.”
Operating at the high latitudes of the northern and southern polar regions has traditionally posed a challenge to long-endurance UAS, which rely on low-angle geostationary satellite communication links that become less reliable above the Arctic Circle and below the Antarctic Circle.
To surpass that 66.5 degree threshold, General Atomics and satellite communications provider Inmarsat developed special data systems able to retain the aircraft’s link to a ground control station while operating in a high-latitude environment.
The result was significantly improved penetration into the polar region. The distance between 66.5 degrees north and 78 degrees north is approximately 1,300km.
However, the RCAF is apparently seeking even greater performance at the poles. McKenna says Canada and NORAD need a solution that will enable remote flight through to the country’s northernmost reaches.
“I think we need to solve that problem,” he says. “We need to be able to surveil there.”
Brinkely notes that since the 2021 test, satellite connectivity has significantly improved, particularly with the emergence of Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink. These provide “pole to pole coverage”, Brinkley says.
”Several customer fleets are already on contract for this global capability,” he adds.
Those developments could allow Canada to expand the mission of its MQ-9B fleet even beyond surveillance. McKenna notes the RCAF is interested in exploring additional roles for the uncrewed aircraft, including anti-submarine warfare (ASW), signals intelligence collection and airborne early warning.
A variant of the MQ-9B called the SeaGuardian is tailored for naval combat missions such ASW, anti-surface warfare and airborne mine countermeasures.
Story updated 5 March to include additional details provided by General Atmoics about the 2021 MQ-9 Arctic test flight.
