Surveillance Australia

Surveillance Australia Pty Ltd is an Australian aviation company. It is a subsidiary of Cobham Aviation Services Australia (formerly National Jet Systems), which is ultimately owned by Qantas Airways Limited. It is primarily engaged in servicing the Australian Customs Service Coastwatch (now the Australian Border Force) contract, flying surveillance patrols within the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone (AEEZ). It supports operations of a single airborne laser depth sounder (LADS) aircraft for the Royal Australian Navy, this provided as a service via the aircraft owner, Fugro.

Operations
Surveillance Australia Dash 8 (2005).

The aircraft fly over 20,000 hours a year of surveillance flying in the AEEZ, searching for illegal fishing vessels, human traffickers, drug importation, immigration and quarantine breaches, and also regularly assist in search and rescue operations.

Surveillance Australia has played major roles in several border protection operations, directly contributing to over 200 foreign fishing vessels being apprehended and destroyed for illegally fishing for shark fin, reef fish and dolphins in Australian waters each year.[1]

In 2005, Surveillance Australia was awarded the A$1 billon Coastwatch contract that will see its aircraft operating through to 2020.[2]

Fleet and bases

Headquartered in Adelaide, the company has three operational bases in Cairns, Darwin and Broome.[3] It operates a fleet of six DHC-8-202 and four larger DHC-8-315 'Dash 8s' modified for maritime patrol and surveillance. One further Dash 8 is configured for the LADS contract.

The surveillance aircraft are equipped with Raytheon SeaVue surface search radars with additional Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Moving target indication (MTI) capability,[4] advanced electro-optical sensors and sophisticated communications suites.[1] They can operate day and night close to land below lowest safe altitude. These aircraft can search an area of 110,000 km² per flight.[5]

A state of the art surveillance information management (SIM) system, able to integrate surveillance and communication and provide real time communications to Customs headquarters in Canberra is due to be installed and operational by October 2008.[1]

Fleet
Surveillance Australia operate this LADS-equipped de Havilland Canada Dash 8

As of September 2008 the Surveillance Australia fleet numbers 14 aircraft:[6]

  • 2 Bombardier DHC-8-202 Dash 8 (as of August 2019)[7]
  • 4 de Havilland Canada DHC-8-202 Dash 8 (as of August 2019)[7]
  • 1 de Havilland Canada DHC-8-202 Dash 8 (LADS-equipped) (as of August 2019)[7]
  • 3 Bombardier DHC-8-315 Dash 8 (as of August 2019)[7]
  • 1 de Havilland Canada DHC-8-315 Dash 8 (as of August 2019)[7]
  • 3 Reims F406 Caravan II

See also

References
  1. Australian Customs 2007 Annual Report Retrieved: 2008-02-05
  2. "Cobham Signs A$1bn Coastwatch Contract"; Cobham plc Media Release Retrieved: 2007-11-11
  3. Surveillance Australia home page. Retrieved: 2007-11-11
  4. "Raytheon Awarded SeaVue Radar Systems Contract for Australian Coastwatch"; Raytheon Media Release. Retrieved: 2008-02-06
  5. Nick Gardner. "Cobham plc :: Home". cobham.com. Retrieved 1 January 2016.
  6. Australian civil aircraft register search, using "Surveillance Australia" as the search parameter. Search conducted 11 September 2008.
  7. "Global Airline Guide 2019 (Part One)". Airliner World: 4. October 2019.
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