Over the inhospitable waters of the North Atlantic, Royal Air Force aircraft play a game of cat and mouse with Russian hunter-killer submarines, and data collection and management are at the heart of its operations.
The primary role of the Poseidon MRA1 maritime patrol fleet is protection of the UK’s continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent. Detecting, and tracking, Russian subs, surface vessels and spy ships is their daily task.
As recently as January this year, a Royal Air Force Poseidon from RAF Lossiemouth was involved in tracking a Russian landing ship, the RFN Aleksandr Shabalin, through the English Channel.
And, should war break out, Poseidons will be called on to coordinate attacks on such surface vessels, or even take on submarines with their on-board torpedoes.
In that way, the task of the RAF’s two maritime patrol squadrons, based at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland, differs little from the missions of their forebears during the Second World War and the Cold War, hunting down German and then later Soviet submarines.
But in many other critical respects, the RAF’s nine Poseidon aircraft are very different from anything that has gone before.
Poseidon, also known by its US designation, P-8A, is very different from the flying boats and converted bombers that hunted U-boats during the Second World War, or the Shackleton and Nimrod aircraft of the post-war period. Poseidon reflects the increasing importance of data as a dimension of modern warfare. In effect, the P-8A is a flying datacentre.
Subsea data processed in the air
From the outside, Poseidon appears unremarkable. The P-8A shares its basic airframe with the Boeing 737-800 airliner, fitted with in-flight refuelling gear, a defensive suite and other adaptations.
It has been “toughened up” for military operations, according to one of its pilots.
This includes removing most of the windows, save for two large side portholes for observers. They are also fitted with stronger wings than a 737-800, to withstand flying at just a few hundred feet over the Atlantic’s waves.
The P-8A also features an internal weapons bay, for torpedoes, and hard points on the wing. These allow it to carry anti-ship, and potentially defensive anti-aircraft missiles, although these are not currently used with RAF aircraft.
But Poseidon’s greatest threat to hostile vessels might not even be a weapon.
Instead, it’s her suite of sensors, including a search radar, a powerful camera and sonobuoy acoustic sensors. Poseidon has two automatic magazines for dropping sonobuoys, as well as a manual launch system, and can use passive and active (“multi-static”) sonobuoy models.
Passing on intelligence
Poseidon crews use sonobuoys to listen for enemy submarines below the surface and triangulate their position. The aircraft collects and processes the buoys’ acoustic data. On-board systems combine this with feeds from the aircraft’s other sensors for Poseidon’s seven mission crew to analyse. They can then pass on the intelligence to other aircraft, or to surface ships.
But Poseidon’s most powerful feature is perhaps her ability to gather and store vast amounts of data for future analysis.
The exact nature of this is classified, but post-mission data is analysed on the ground at Lossiemouth – “terabytes” of it, according to the RAF.
The resulting intelligence “product” is then made available to the RAF, the Royal Navy, and potentially Nato and “five eyes” allies.
This allows commanders to form an accurate intelligence picture of vessel movements through the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap in the North Sea.
“We do that by building ‘recognised maritime pictures’ of the surface and subsurface, knowing where the people are that we would not like to be within reach of our submarines,” says squadron leader Peter Armitage, officer commanding of the P8 Tactical Operations Centre.
The fact that the P-8A is a standard, even off-the-shelf aircraft, used across allied nations, helps here. Nato countries operate around 40 Poseidons in the North Atlantic. Further afield, Australia and New Zealand also have P-8A fleets.
The RAF’s P-8A fleet is supported on land by a dedicated data processing system, built primarily with components from Fortinet and NetApp. This feeds into the RAF’s Air Chan, Air Content Hosting and Access Network, command and control programme.
According to Toby Milwright, Poseidon and Air LDO manager at Defence Digital, which manages communications and information systems across UK defence, there are several stages of data gathering and processing for maritime patrol aircraft.
“It’s aiding your flight planning and the communications before you go flying so the air crews are going out with the right intelligence,” he says. “It’s about on-task communication with the aircraft wherever it is … and that’s both in terms of voice communications and also data communications.”
But it’s what happens after the flight that has seen the most changes to how data is handled, processed and turned into intelligence.
“That’s the post-flight, post-mission management of the data,” he says. “Data comes off the aircraft. It’s processed on this particular aircraft mission equipment, and then we want to look after it, and then, it’s sort of our half, our part in what’s known as the ‘intelligence cycle’.”
Modern data systems a game changer
With older surveillance aircraft, such as Nimrod, analysts mostly worked with analogue information sources that used systems designed as far back as the 1970s. According to the RAF, media with collected data was physically moved from aircraft all the way to analysts elsewhere in UK. This took time.
“The process was very manual before, in the way they distributed that data to remote locations,” says Huw Davies, account director for the MOD at NetApp, which provides the data storage layer for Air Chan. “It would potentially take weeks for that information to be shared and analysed. Now we are down to hours and minutes.”
Poseidon is a step change in the way it handles information, as the process is entirely digital and data moves in near real time.
Media from the aircraft is transferred into the MOD’s system technology – local components of the Air Chan network – for what the RAF describes as “ordered ingest of bulk data, curation of that data and making it available to analysts over MOD secure networks”.
The core data storage infrastructure is NetApp’s StorageGrid technology, which uses S3 object storage and runs on the suppliers’ E-series storage hardware. Fortinet provides networking.
For operational reasons, neither NetApp nor Defence Digital can confirm the exact volumes of data involved. It is “probably in the terabytes per sortie as a typical number”, says Davies. He qualifies this with the caveat that an air-sea rescue mission, another Poseidon task, could be significantly longer than an anti-submarine patrol.
Object storage and unstructured data
“It’s an unstructured object storage environment,” explains NetApp’s Davies. “There’s video camera imagery, and sonar detection as well. So, all of that data is collected by the sensors. There’s a lot of data that’s collected, for sure.”
The data storage and analysis system is, however, all on-premise. Redundancy is via secondary data storage offsite, running over protected inter-site links.
As well as StorageGrid, the current system for handling the P-8A’s data system also incorporates additional local storage used by intelligence analysts. This provides quick, local access to critical information.
This is vital, given the amount of information involved. The P-8A is designed to patrol for four hours or more.
A key part of intelligence processing is then to “curate the data, adding metadata, relationships between objects and security permissions”, according to Defence Digital’s Toby Milwright.
Identifying relevant information
P-8A mission data is tagged during flights. This greatly speeds up the time it takes for the RAF’s intelligence specialists to identify relevant information. “One of the things that we do is labelling of data whilst in flight, that we’re able to quickly tag,” says NetApp’s Davies. “It is the better data, the interesting elements of the sortie, rather than looking at six hours of data and trying to wade through that … they don’t have to look at as big a dataset. They can look at specific information.”
This allows the MOD to use off-the-shelf IT hardware, albeit hardware that meets strict government standards for security and availability. However, StorageGrid is a commercial product, widely used in enterprises. “It is enterprise grade. StorageGrid is used in the enterprise world as well. It is not specific to defence,” he says.
And the actual performance requirements are manageable, according to Davies. “It’s not intra-second performance,” he says. “It’s making the metadata available to the analysts.” Reliability, availability and long-term support are as important, he adds.
A military aircraft system can have a 30-year service life, and the missions it undertakes can change significantly over that time. The communications and information systems technology needs to keep pace.
For now, data from Poseidon and the StorageGrid system is currently based at fixed locations, but there is an ambition to develop a deployable version, which could accompany P-8A missions away from their home base.
In the future, the data fabric that supports Poseidon operations could be extended to other “defence domains”, says Davies. Linking more defence users to Poseidon’s data output justifies the UK’s investment in the aircraft, in the three P-8A squadrons, and in RAF Lossiemouth, the RAF’s only station in Scotland.
It also provides the assurance that should potentially hostile forces move on or under the seas of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, they will not go undetected.
