Posted on 10/24/2014 8:23:02 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
OKINAWA, Japan—Swooping down to 500 feet over the western Pacific, Cmdr. Bill Pennington pilots his U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft toward an unidentified vessel off southern Japan.
In the back of the plane, a heavily modified Boeing 737, the crew homes in on the vessel using a barrage of surveillance equipment, including radar, GPS and infrared cameras.
Further down the fuselage stand rows of tube-shaped sonar buoys that the crew can catapult into the sea and that float for up to eight hours as they track objects underwater.
This is a dummy run: Today’s target is a Singaporean container ship, and the P-8 roars by without dropping the buoys. But the aircraft is designed to hunt a far more elusive, and potentially dangerous, quarry: Chinese submarines.
It is one of six P-8 jets the U.S. has sent to its Kadena air base in Okinawa since December as part of its strategy of “rebalancing” toward Asia, deploying more military and diplomatic resources to the region in response to China’s growing firepower and assertiveness.
Okinawa is integral to that strategy because it flanks the East China Sea site of a bitter territorial dispute between China and Japan. And it houses the closest U.S. base to the South China Sea, where China’s maritime claims overlap with those of the Philippines, another U.S. ally.
Okinawa also sits next to one of the main chokepoints, the Miyako Strait, that U.S. officials say Chinese subs have used in recent years to enter the Pacific. “If we have history, if there’s a trend of them getting from point A to point B, then we’ll exploit that,” says Cmdr. Pennington. He calls the P-8 a “game-changer,” despite some criticism in the U.S. of the $34 billion the Pentagon is spending on developing and buying the planes.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
so are the p-8s finally working as well as the p-3 orions did? i thought these had lots of problems with the electronics and were less capable of detecting stuff. or maybe i am confusing the p-8 with the aircraft that was suposedly to replace the p-3s.
We were always on the brink of war and on the eve of nuclear Armageddon when Reagan was pres.
What about now, you Media Pieces of *$*#?
The P-8 is the replacement for the P-3. It’s working just fine, thank you.
I heard it’s a complete P.O.S., this new aircraft.
Active Duty ping.
Targeting a merchant ship is not neccesarily a dummy run.
Subs may try to hide under large merchant ships. A shipmate recalled a serious close on encounter of planes & ships & sonar buoys on a tanker run from Alaska to lower 48. Whether a joint training exercise with US & Canadians on one of their own subs or a hostile.
The most advanced defense technology is useless with an Idiot in charge.
I’d like to see a return to the old Catalina PBY flying boats.
Has 0bama declassified everything, including the divulging of all methods and sources to speed up the collapse of America yet? Edward Snowden just wasn’t enough, I guess.
P3A/B avionics ground pounder here (AX), does the P8 have or need an aft radar?
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