The MQ-9B SeaGuardian redefines the future of maritime and naval security

We don’t think about the risks that pilots and crew take every day to protect our shores and keep us safe, until we learn about an innovation that allows continuous surveillance with real time data relay while they work safely from the shore.

The world isn’t getting any simpler, so governments everywhere are reaching for tools that can help leaders first understand and then decide how to act.

Few systems better symbolise the application of technology in response to these needs than remotely piloted aircraft, which have revolutionised governance everywhere – including military, security, environmental operations and more.

The U.S. aerospace and defense vendor General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., has led this charge for decades and never stopped innovating. U.S. and other governmental and international clients always are in mind but frequently the company takes its own initiative and works with its own internal funding.

An MQ-9B equipped with a maritime search radar provides gamechanging domain awareness and other capabilities to naval and coast guard commanders. The aircraft can monitor coastal areas or open ocean and, when equipped, hunt for hostile submarines. // GA-ASI

This helped yield one of its most recent breakthroughs, a game-changing new capability for fixed wing remotely piloted aircraft that alters maritime security and naval operations everywhere – with huge implications for the work of nations in the Western Pacific: Anti-Submarine Warfare.

The new MQ-9B SeaGuardian patrol aircraft is the only one of its kind that can search for and track submerged targets. It’s an ideal application for a remotely operated system but one that hasn’t been possible until now thanks to the latest equipment and software from GA-ASI and its partners.

To understand the implications of the SeaGuardian’s new sub-hunting capabilities, it’s helpful to start from the beginning: What makes it and other aircraft like it revolutionary are their abilities to stay aloft far longer than human-crewed aircraft, searching or tracking, or taking other tasks essentially non-stop.

These aircraft operate overhead for 20 hours, 30 hours, or more at a time, depending on their configuration – relieving each other when working in teams to provide continuous surveillance and other effects. Their human pilots and other crew members work from safely distant ground stations, sometimes thousands of miles away. That removes them from any danger of hostile action and it also makes their workload much more manageable than the crews of a traditional aircraft.

An aircraft that operates this way, processing sensor data in real time, can thus accomplish things that older models never could. In the case of the SeaGuardian, that includes sweeping huge swathes of ocean with its sensors or, if necessary, descending to drop sonobuoys to search for submerged targets.

Every MQ-9B has a powerful electro-optical infrared camera that sends back full-motion video in day or night, enabling operations commanders to read the name off a ship of interest, for example, or watch for themselves as events unfold amongst a group of vessels. The aircraft also has a sophisticated Lynx multi-mode radar, which can see through smoke, clouds, haze and provide long-range synthetic aperture radar maps and more.

The MQ-9B SeaGuardian revolutionises maritime domain awareness and sea combat with its ability to patrol both the ocean’s surface and hunt for hostile submarines. The aircraft is shown in an illustration operating with human-crewed surface ships and patrol aircraft. // GA-ASI

The SeaGuardian operates with a dedicated multi-mode maritime radar, giving it pervasive coverage over large swathes of ocean or littoral areas, and has an Automatic Identification System sensor that collects the signals often broadcast by oceangoing vessels. One useful application for the patrol aircraft is to interrogate ships that have been detected but which aren’t displaying AIS information – or which government officials suspect may be falsifying their AIS signals. The SeaGuardian can look for itself if necessary and provide rich detail about a ship. The multi-mode radar also provides the capability for stand-off imaging of vessels and land masses.

The aircraft can also carry up to 40 standard size sonobuoys or 80 smaller size sonobuoys. It can descend from its normal patrol altitude to release these sensors from wing pods; the sonobuoys release a small parachute to slow their descent to the ocean surface. Once they enter the water, the sonobuoys can listen passively for signatures linked to undersea activity – or they can use their own active sonar to search for targets.

These applications unlock a huge range of options for defence force commanders. They might use SeaGuardians on their own for the often time-consuming initial search and tracking phases of an anti-submarine mission. Or they might decide to use them along with a human-piloted patrol aircraft to collectively achieve greater coverage.

An MQ-9 remotely piloted aircraft integrates with the U.S. Navy littoral combat ship USS Coronado during sophisticated military exercises off the West Coast of the United States. The aircraft’s maritime and submarine-hunting capabilities are the first of their kind in an aircraft of its class. // Photo courtesy MCC Shannon Renfroe, USN

One advantage of the remotely piloted aircraft is that it lets defence forces or civil security agencies be more judicious with the use of their traditional patrol aircraft. A SeaGuardian costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars to operate per hour – as compared with roughly $35,000 for a larger, multi-engine, humancrewed patrol aircraft. The SeaGuardian requires about 90 kg of fuel per hour, as compared to a larger aircraft, which needs to burn more than 2,200 kilograms.

So having the option to use cost-effective, more sustainable remotely piloted aircraft provides commanders with choices they haven’t had before. They may opt to use traditional aircraft and helicopters less – saving them for focused and informed actions when most needed.

For example, suppose the SeaGuardian were assigned to patrol an important strait or waterway. It could loiter overhead indefinitely, working in teams with other remotely piloted aircraft – and if it detected a contact of interest, naval commanders might decide to send a human-crewed aircraft to join it. That way, in a crisis or conflict, the unit that might be tasked with releasing a torpedo against the threat could have a local human operator aboard.

The SeaGuardian’s ability to make a difference isn’t theoretical. In a number of real-world flights, including historic patrols around Japan last year, the platform showed what it can deliver in providing maritime domain awareness over thousands of miles of coastline and ocean.

The U.S. Navy and GA-ASI also have completed a number of demonstrations in the Pacific off the West Coast of the United States. Remotely piloted aircraft – whose human operators were hundreds of miles inland – integrated with U.S. warships and helped them detect targets they weren’t tracking with their own onboard sensors.

More tests scheduled with U.S. and allied militaries are likely to show even more adaptability over the coming year.

Another great value of the MQ-9B, however, is that all this maritime and sub-hunting equipment is modular and can be removed or installed as the mission dictates. A “clean” aircraft has even greater endurance with its onboard sensors and could take maritime, littoral or over-land surveillance missions. And with a growing number of specialised payloads, a wide range of other missions are possible including acting as a communications node, or conducting specialized electronic warfare or long-range electro-optical surveillance missions.

These many applications are part of what has created such high international interest in the MQ-9B, and which are expected to keep these highly versatile aircraft evolving and flying for decades to come.