the first time he stepped into an actual P-8A aircraft: It smelled nice, it was new. He was amazed on that first flight by the powerful thrust and much steeper climb angle on takeoff compared with the P-3. And the amount of automation—having so much more situational awareness and not having to worry about hand-flying the aircraft, as with the P-3—has allowed him to be more tactically relevant as a pilot, he said. Nowhere is that more critical than on a mission, where operating safely depends on good communication and coordination between the flight and mission crews. It’s the pilot’s job to provide that bird’s-eye view, Falzetta said. For example, if a TACCO wants to deploy sonobuoys into the ocean to listen for submarines, the TACCO relies on the pilot to enable that task using the aircraft’s pneumatic launcher. To ensure accurate placement of the sonobuoys, a pilot may choose to fly low; future updates to the aircraft will allow pilots to perform this task at higher altitudes, with increased sensor performance, Boeing said. Once launched into the ocean, the sonobuoys float up to the water’s surface, each deploying its hydrophone to a predetermined depth. It’s then up to the acoustic operators to observe and interpret the data received and displayed on their monitors. “It’s kind of like looking at that movie The Matrix,” said Lt. Graham, a P-3 pilot turned P-8A instructor pilot, describing the way the sound’s frequencies appear on the monitor to the operators tracking them. “It’s all just kind of cascading down in front of them and it looks like a bunch of static.” But it’s no ordinary static. To an acoustic operator, it’s a language of signals and frequencies—which change depending on how the submarine is operating. If a sub suddenly detects it’s being tracked or if it “hears” a buoy splash, Graham explained, it might sprint or change direction. Pilots who have flown the P-3 20 | BOEING FRONTIERS
Frontiers April 2016 Issue
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