Australian Aviation - July 2018

32 AUSTRALIAN AVIATION

knowledge superiority.

Aircraft track People’s Liberation

Army Air Force (PLAAF) Chengdu

J-20 aircraft conducting their own

combat air patrols, monitoring and

classifying their radar emissions and

also those from a variety of air defence

radars operating from PLA-Navy ships

as well as from the island bases. That’s

all without registering more than some

faint returns on the PLA radars.

But undetected they aren’t. As one

aircraft makes its final approach to

land at Butterworth, a small quad-

rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)

zooms into its path.

The pilot avoids a collision – just

• but his wingman isn’t so fortunate.
  A second UAV goes straight into his

engine. The pilot safely ejects but a

$150 million aircraft has just fallen

victim to a UAV worth at most a

couple of thousand dollars.

Worse is to come. As smoke from

the burning aircraft rises into the sky,

dozens of small suicide UAVs rise

from scattered backyards and bush

clearings and converge on the base,

each carrying an explosive payload

about the equivalent of a hand

grenade – quite sufficient to damage

or destroy an expensive aircraft.

These UAVs are flying

autonomously in a swarm, heading to

coordinates based on satellite imagery

taken in the previous half-hour. Many

fall to base defences – electronic

jamming and good old-fashioned

A

s tensions rise over China’s
territorial claims in the South
China Sea, Australia deploys a
squadron of F-35A Lightning
Joint Strike Fighters (JSFs), to the
Royal Malaysian Air Force Base
Butterworth.
This is a location very familiar to
many Australian defence personnel
from decades of deployments, going
back to the dark days of World War 2.
For the Australian Defence Force
(ADF), this is the first regional
deployment of the F-35, an aircraft
far better than anything operated by
any regional air force. Initial combat
air patrols, out into the South China
Sea, though nowhere close to the
disputed territory, demonstrate F-35’s

AIR

POWER

DISR

UPTION

DISRUPTION

WRITER: MAX BLENKIN

Australia is building its future air power capabilities around

the F-35. What future threats might the fifth-gen fighter face?

What future threats will RAAF

F-35s face?DEFENCE