Surveillance Australia

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Surveillance Australia Pty Ltd is a subsidiary of Cobham Flight Operations & Services Australia. They are primarily engaged in servicing the Australian Customs Service Coastwatch contract, flying surveillance patrols within the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone (AEEZ), but also operate a further aircraft for Tenix/LADS.

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[edit] Fleet and Bases

Headquartered in Adelaide the company has three operational bases in Cairns, Darwin and Broome. [1] They operate a fleet of six DHC-8-202-MPA and four larger DHC-8-315-MPA 'Dash 8s' modified for 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 ISAR, SAR and MTI capability[2], advanced electro-optical sensors and sophisticated communications suites. [3] They can operate day and night close to land and below lowest safe altitude. [4]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 [6]

[edit] Operations

The aircraft fly over 20,000 hours a year of surveillance flying in the AEEZ, searching for illegal fishing vessels, people smugglers, 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. [7]

In 2005, Surveillance Australia was awarded the $1,000,000,000 Coastwatch contract that will see their aircraft operating through to 2020. [8]

Recently, a Broome Dash-8 crew completed the 200,000th hour of surveillance operations. [9]

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