South Africa not equipped to do sea search

Forget crashing off the coast of South Africa folks. IF (big 'if', geddit?) by a miracle your plane was to land on the water a la Captain Sullenberger on the Hudson River in New York City and you managed to crawl out onto the wing, the only thing that will do is give you time to observe first hand (filming optional but would be appreciated by YouTube aficionados) how an airliner sinks.

'Cos the SA navy sure ain't coming to get you. They can't. Unlike the Brazilians that could and tried so admirably recently with the Air France tragedy. We could though, once upon a time. Pre 1994. Hmm, what's changed since?

***

South Africa would 
not be equipped for 
an ocean search

On June 1, an Air France Airbus A330-200 crashed into the South Atlantic, more than 1 000 km from the nearest land, while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. For at least two weeks our reports of the accident and the search for wreckage and bodies were the most read stories in our online edition, www.engineeringnews.co.za.

At the publication deadline for this edition, the cause of the 
accident was still a mystery and the aircraft’s so-called black 
boxes – the cockpit voice 
recorder and the digital flight data recorder – had not been 
located, let alone retrieved. But a major search and recovery 
operation was under way across a wide swath of the ocean. This has involved the deployment of an impressive quantity and quality of air power and sea power.

Responsibility for the coordination of the operation was 
vested in the Brazilian Air Force, as the Aibus came down just within Brazil’s search-and-
rescue (SaR) area. The numbers of aircraft and ships 
deployed by Brazil and France varied over time, as the situation and conditions changed. But, on June 16, the Brazilian Air Force had assigned ten aircraft to the operation, comprising one Embraer R-99, two Embraer P-95 Bandeirante Patrulhas, three Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules, two EADS-Casa C-105 
Amazonas, one Sikorsky H-60L Blackhawk helicopter, and one Eurocopter H-34 Super Puma helicopter. France had two aircraft deployed, both from the French Navy: a Dassault Atlantique 2 and a Dassault Falcon 50. Earlier in the operation, the French were using four aircraft – in addition to the two already mentioned, a second Atlantique 2 and a French Air Force Boeing E-3F Sentry.

The Hercules and Amazonas are transport aircraft, employed for daylight visual missions. The P-95s and Falcon 50 are more 
sophisticated, being adaptations of civilian designs (the Bandeirante feeder airliner and the Falcon executive jet) fitted with surface surveillance radars, 
capable of detecting vessels down to quite small boats. But the R-99, the E-3 and the Atlantiques are very sophisticated, and 
expensive, aircraft, indeed.

The R-99 is an air-to-surface radar surveillance aircraft, equipped with a powerful synthetic aperture radar. It gives Brazil a capability that only a handful of air forces have (the French Air Force is not one of them), and the aircraft has been the star of the operation. Up to June 14, it had scanned 1 019 548 km2 of ocean, and had located most, if not all, of the debris fields, often while flying at night.

The E-3 is an airborne warning and control aircraft – that is, it is a flying radar station and command post.

The Atlantique 2 is called a maritime patrol (MP), or maritime reconnaissance, aircraft, which means it is an antisub-
marine and antiship warfare aircraft. It is fitted with a powerful search radar, a magnetic anomaly 
detector which detects changes 
in the earth’s magnetic field caused by submarines moving through the ocean (this works at only short ranges, because the changes are so small) and it can drop devices called sonobuoys into the ocean. These can either listen passively for submarines, or actively send out sound pulses 
which will be reflected back if they hit a submarine.

All these planes were designed to fulfil military/defence roles and it is precisely their military capabilities that make them so useful in SaR operations. And South Africa has no counterparts of any of these three designs.

To be fair, the R-99 is a type of aircraft beyond the means of most countries, including South Africa. But the country used to operate MP aircraft and the South African Air Force (SAAF) has plans to reacquire this 
capability.

However, at the moment, if an airliner should crash into the ocean near the edge of South Africa’s area of SaR responsibility, the SAAF 
itself could engage in only daylight visual search missions, using its C-130 transports. The SAAF has only nine of these, with, reportedly, an average of five serviceable at any given time. Brazil has deployed three Hercules – equivalent to 60% of South Africa’s operational force – on the Air France Airbus search operation.

The SAAF is clearly most 
inadequately equipped to under-
take a major SaR or recovery operation far from shore. But, no doubt, when the MP acquisition programme is formally 
announced, there will be a barrage of criticism and claims that the country does not need the 
capability. When that happens, just remember the highly sophisticated and very expensive Brazilian and French aircraft sweeping across the South Atlantic, by night as well as day, locating debris and guiding surface ships to retrieve it as well as the bodies of passengers.

Oh, by the way, the Brazilian and French navies committed more major surface warships to the Airbus recovery operation than there are in the entire South African Navy!