Tag Archive for: aviation

An aviation nation needs a national air power enterprise

Australia needs to bring the civil, military and industrial components of aviation policy into a coherent whole.

It should view the sector as a national enterprise to promote mutual support among its various parts. The civilian aviation workforce could be seen as a defence asset, for example, and various efforts to support aerospace manufacturing could be better coordinated to create a stronger industry.

Adopting such a policy would be a big part of what the government has called ‘a coordinated whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach to Australia’s defence’. It would make better use of resources.

The need is urgent because, as the National Defence Strategy released in April reiterated, Australia no longer has at least 10 years’ warning of major conflict—and hasn’t since 2020. Crucially, airspace security and aviation services can be disrupted well before conflict breaks out, as demonstrated by Chinese probing of the skies of Taiwan and Japan.

Unfortunately, none of this influenced the government’s Aviation White Paper—Towards 2050, published in August. Instead, departmental rather than national policies passed each other like aircraft in cloud.

The Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts focused the white paper strictly on civil and general aviation. Meanwhile, the Department of Defence’s 2024 National Defence Strategy concentrates on military issues, of which air power is but one. Defence is not listed as making a public submission to the aviation white paper. Meanwhile, policy responsibility for the aerospace industry is with the Department of Industry, Science and Resources—and also with Defence, which published its own Defence Industry Development Strategy in February.

Thinking of air power as a national enterprise is not unique or new; it’s just not apparent in Australian policy. The Australian Defence Force’s peak air power doctrine defines the concept as ‘the total strength of a nation’s capability to conduct and influence activities in, through and from the air to achieve its objectives’—but then narrows its gaze to military aviation.

Australian sea power has been consistently portrayed as a national enterprise for years. Arguably, this has led to the government investing in Australia’s merchant fleet and to Defence spending more on naval power than air, land and cyber combined.

British spending on combat air power since 2018 has been guided by a framework that accounts for whole-of-nation security and prosperity objectives. New Zealand’s national aerospace strategy links planned growth in civil aviation to defence and security.

For Australia, adopting the concept of a national air power enterprise is unusually valuable because, as the aviation white paper says, the country is uniquely reliant on aviation. It’s no wonder there are more than 16,000 aircraft on Australia’s civil registry.

The components of Australia’s air power enterprise share challenges that adopting national approaches could address. A supply of skilled labour is among the most serious.

The white paper’s initiatives to improve aviation workforce planning, training and regulation are positive but the document missed a chance to portray the aviation workforce and its training base as national assets.

Instead, it describes the ADF as a major source of skilled labour—and also as a competitor that will ‘exacerbate future skilled aviation workforce challenges in Australian civil aviation’. No public document discusses how the civil aviation sector’s 50,000-strong workforce, a pool of aviation-savvy Australians about three times larger than the Royal Australian Air Force, could be harnessed in times of crisis.

Similarly, a national approach to aircrew training could build capacity. For example, key measures in Britain’s buildup of trained aircrew in the 1930s included the use of civil flying schools for elementary training and establishment of low-readiness reserves to support part-time flying training at civil schools.

And the absence of a national concept for air power means there is no coherent guidance on how Australia’s aerospace industry could reshape air power in the national interest. Instead, policy for the aerospace industry is diffused and divergent. The Defence Industrial Development Strategy alone spreads direction for the aerospace industry across at least three of seven priority areas.

In 2019, Australia’s aerospace industry comprised almost 1000 companies, employed nearly 20,000 people and boasted commercially competitive research, uncrewed-systems expertise and advanced manufacturing, according to a government report. That report also found the industry to be commercially viable and adding almost $3 billion to the economy annually.

Since then, the aerospace industry has designed and built a growing variety of advanced aviation components and uncrewed aircraft, including the fighter-like Boeing Ghost Bat. But if there has been government support for these efforts, it has been experimental or based on specific projects rather than a coordinated effort to help build autonomous aircraft domestically.

More is needed because domestically produced autonomous aircraft could use an Australian industry strength to liberate Australian aviation from the labour constraints of a small population.

This is what reshaping air power to create new potential in the national interest could look like. Australia needs more from its air power to address deteriorating security and resources shortages. The first steps are a coherent concept of Australia’s national air power enterprise and a vision of what the nation needs.

Defence and commercial aviation need to work together to transition from fossil fuels

ASPI’s The geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific is a sobering read that describes the international security implications of climate change in our region in 2035. In one description of a plausible future, the authors assume that the global energy system will undergo rapid transformation from fossil fuels to renewables. While there is active debate on how this should occur for areas such as the energy grid and various parts of the transport sector, aviation doesn’t appear to have attracted nearly as much discussion.

However, the aviation sector should heed ASPI’s warning because as both a military and a commercial venture, sustainability in aviation has been a constant challenge since the jet engine was invented.

The commercial aviation sector and Defence aviation need to collaborate to grow an alternative fuels market in Australia to supplement fossil fuel supplies and set up their long-term transition to full renewables. Otherwise, non-viability and irrelevance will occur ‘gradually and then suddenly’.

Since the first flight of a turbojet-powered aircraft in 1939, the recurring cycle of engine evolution followed better fuel performance has created deep-rooted conservatism and dependence on fossil fuels by aircraft and engine manufacturers.

The fuel crisis of the 1970s raised questions about the validity of this dependence on oil supplies while adding volatility in the cost of fuel to the mix. Between 1972 and 1985 the price of a barrel of oil per fluctuated from under $20 to reach a peak of over $120 only to drop below $20 again. To counter concerns about energy security and fuel-price volatility, countries such as the US supplemented their conventional jet fuel reserves with fuels produced from coal, tar sands and shale oil.

Large military operators also transitioned in response to the same concerns. In 1979, the US Air Force moved from its main operating fuel jet propellant number 4 (JP4), which is a blend of kerosene and gasoline, to JP8, a commercial aviation fuel containing military additives for protection against corrosion, static build-up and icing.

More recently, challenges associated with greenhouse effects due to fossil fuel use have been in focus. Based on trends prior to Covid-19, commercial aviation’s contribution to global emissions was estimated to be 2–3%. That figure is misleading, however, because the emissions footprint is more severe due to the fuel’s emissions release at altitude. Before Covid, the aviation industry’s emissions were increasing, with overall fuel consumption expected to grow by 38% between 2008 and 2025.

In the face of these challenges, the aviation sector has sought to use ‘drop-in’ alternative fuels that are suitable for existing aircraft. Investment in drop-in alternative jet fuels is mainly due to the time and cost involved in engine and aircraft design and development. These fuels are interchangeable with conventional fuels with no degradation in performance or safety and don’t require any engine or airframe modifications.

Drop-in alternative fuels are divided into two broad categories. The first includes synthetic jet fuels produced from coal, natural gas and other hydrocarbons. The second includes bio-jet fuels produced from biological matter such as plant oils and animal fats. Synthetic jet fuels can be produced through gasification of organic matter, the results of which are further synthesised through the Fischer–Tropsch process. Bio-jet fuels are produced through hydroprocessing (removing chemically bound oxygen from the initial product to bring it to the desired jet-fuel boiling range) of biological matter.

Synthetic jet and bio-jet fuels burn much cleaner than their traditional counterparts, leading to lower greenhouse-gas emissions. Some synthetic jet-fuel production methods are emissions-intensive, however, reducing their overall benefits. In contrast, the entire emissions lifecycle of bio-jet fuels from production to consumption is much better than both conventional and synthetic fuels, making them attractive from an emissions and sustainability perspective. For instance, bio-jet fuel produced from camelina reportedly delivered a 70% savings in lifecycle emissions compared to conventional fuel.

The establishment of industrial-scale alternative fuel production facilities has traditionally been deemed uncompetitive and hasn’t been widely pursued. A 2013 study by Qantas and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency estimated that a reference facility capable of producing 20,000 barrels a day of sustainable aviation fuel from natural oils would cost approximately $1 billion.

Accordingly, there has been a clear absence of subsidies and seed investment for such ventures in Australia. Over the past few of years this situation was exacerbated by a glut of fossil fuels that saw the price of oil drop to record lows. The aviation sector has continued to rely on fossil fuels with the knowledge that it is still at the whim of oil cartels and constantly exposed to external shocks. The Ukraine crisis once again highlights the effects of external events on the cost of oil.

Factors such as technological maturity and cheaper renewables have started to accelerate the transition of large portions of the market towards renewable fuels such as hydrogen. A 2020 study conducted by CSIRO and Boeing suggests that, due to their energy per volume, sustainable aviation  fuels produced from hydrogen will be the fuel of choice for medium- to long-haul flights out to 2050.

With new technologies coming online, the aviation industry—including Defence—will need to revisit its investment strategies if it wants to gain access to sustainable aviation fuels. But this can’t be achieved by single players operating in silos. Choosing to take the traditional approach and leaving it to the market to look after itself to save fuel costs in the short term will likely have long-term consequences like supply shortages or paying high premium when the rest of the transport sector has completed the transition to renewables. These factors should be as troubling for Defence as they are for the commercial aviation sector.

The commercial sector and Defence should form a coalition to shape the aviation fuel market in Australia by providing a secure source of investment for alternative fuel producers. The alternative fuels can then supplement traditional fuel sources until a complete transition away from fossil fuels can occur. The CSIRO–Boeing study suggests that one plausible future includes the production of electrofuels, which use electricity from renewable sources and combine them with green hydrogen and CO2 to produce sustainable aviation fuels at the point of delivery. However, without the appropriate investment and support such a future in 2050 is just as much a mirage as energy security, stable fuel costs and low emissions have been since 1939.

The path ahead for Army aviation

Australian Army MRH-90 Taipan multi-role helicopters depart an airfield at the beginning of a mission in Shoalwater Bay training area, near Rockhampton, Queensland, during Exercise Blue Dog 2.

When I started to ponder Army aviation in its totality, I realised that force structure planning and project definition for Army aviation is a bit of a mess. Lest that sound a bit harsh, let me say that most of the elements work okay in practice, albeit with a question mark over a couple. And some of the more egregious problems weren’t Army’s fault. But it’s hard to see much coherence across the spectrum of capabilities and projects. And given that Army spent the period 1999–2014 pretty much continuously on operation, the fact that it didn’t manage to have its own utility and armed reconnaissance helicopters in theatre in Afghanistan, often relying on coalition air support instead, suggests some issues.

Let’s start with the MRH-90 multi-role helicopter, a contender for the replacement for the S70 Blackhawks when fleet ‘rationalisation’ was the flavour of the month. Fast forward to the present day, and we find the Navy is in the process of taking delivery of 24 new Romeo model Seahawk combat helicopters from the United States, while the Army continues to operate Black Hawks while working to get the MRH90s up to speed. (See here for more.) Not much in the way of rationalisation has been achieved—and Army wants something else for special forces.

Then there’s the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, now well over seven years late. When the decision to acquire it was made, the Apache was in service with American and other forces and ready to go. Fortunately, some sterling work from the project team, industry and Army has got the Tiger to where the ADF wants it to be. But it’ll be an orphan in terms of configuration and when it comes time to upgrade the aircraft (according to the most recent public DCP sometime around 2020) we’ll have to decide whether to continue to develop our unique capability or buy something else—either way it’ll be expensive.

And while we were still faffing round with our Tigers, the French had theirs flying combat missions in Afghanistan, Libya and Mali. That suggests that the local problem wasn’t so much the airframe as the systems architecture we were trying to fit it into.

At least Army can’t blame others for missed opportunities on UAVs. Its first attempt at the world of UAVs was essentially a case of overreach of ambition, specifications that couldn’t be met, irreconcilable technical problems and, eventually, project cancellation. (See page 182 of the 2008 ASPI budget brief.) In the meantime, Army got its hands on ScanEagle and the man-portable Skylark, and discovered that you can do more with less in this space. When the larger and largely contractor supported Heron was added to the ADF mix, it suddenly looked like a pretty handy suite of UAVs. All that was missing was an armed UAV to provide persistent armed reconnaissance and flying fire support. All the noises around an armed drone capability suggest that we might soon have one.

Army also has to work out what its amphibious capability will look like and will have to master embarked aviation operations. And if there’s one place a rationalised helicopter force with overlapping logistics chains would be useful, it’d be on a ship. To some extent with Navy’s MRH90 utility helicopters alongside Army’s will work, but if we want to add ASW helicopters to the mix there’ll be little commonality.

In summary, Army’s aviation force structure is a mixture of the good, the not-so-good and the ‘time will tell’. And it has come together in an ad hoc way (and at a painfully slow pace). It’s worth thinking about what a strategic plan for Army aviation would look like. I don’t think it’s too hard. The Army—and the ADF more broadly—needs to be able to do a couple of things well.

First, it needs to be joined up—not exactly a startling conclusion when ‘network centric’ and ‘jointery’ have been catch phrases for years. But it hasn’t obviously been factored highly enough in some decisions—ARH certainly wasn’t a ‘plug and play’ force element off the shelf. Intra-ADF connectivity, including tactical data links between all of the combat platforms should be a no-brainer.

Second, Army needs to be able to get to coalition operations and plug into American and NATO compatible networks. And it needs to be able to take its own aviation along, confident that it can work with partners. The easiest way to do that is to source platforms from the same place, with connectivity and compatibility built in. There’s a lot to be said for sourcing materiel from the US as a default position, and buying established and mature platforms through Foreign Military Sales works best of all.

Being able to plug into American systems just makes sense, and makes everyone’s life easier. If we keep our kit at the same baseline as American forces, interoperability follows. And given that the Navy and Air Force are pretty much on the path of interoperability with the US anyway, moving the Army in the same direction would also make ADF intra-operability easier.

This post is adapted from a talk given at ASPI’s Land Forces Conference yesterday. The script for the talk is here.