Chapter 26: Plans for the Aerospace Industry

Since I now had my foot in the door with both MD and Northrop, I needed to show them what I could do.

Northrop is the biggest challenge simply because of how few and what projects they have on the go. They recently stopped selling the F-5 light fighter. The YF-23 ends up a failure. That only left the F-18, and there is no need to upgrade it yet.

That left me trying to convince them to reopen the F-5 project. It isn’t something they want to do since they just finished failing in their attempt to revitalize the project. They had built three upgraded F-5 costing them 1.3billion USD, renaming it the F-20 Tigershark. But they couldn’t sell it. It was too expensive for too little a plane. What they don’t know is the plans for the F-5 that they end up selling, wind up being revived as the Azarakhsh (1997), HESA Saeqeh (2007) and the HESA Kowsar (2018).

I had seen the Saeqeh when I did a tour in the middle east. You would be surprised how much tech originally invented for the aerospace industry ends up in warships. The Iranians thought I wouldn’t understand all the schematics they left lying around. Little did they know. Aeronautics was a hobby of mine. Between the marine engineering and the aeronautics there wasn’t much I didn’t understand. Thankfully this was before the military drugged me up and took away my mind.

I would tell you how I ended up on an Iranian Air Force base, but some fairly important people would be quite embarrassed. Instead, I will tell you of a similar story that happened in China. In Qingdao, Shandong, China, there is a top-secret submarine base. Most navies around the world know it is there, but it is where they test and house their most advanced submarines. During a diplomatic trip on a Canadian frigate, we stopped there and were hosted by a Type 052B destroyer. We were kept far enough away from the sub pens that we weren’t able to discern anything of use to the western world. That isn’t to say we didn’t take home a shit-ton of intelligence.

This was in 2004. China had just admitted to having the Type 052B destroyers. The best intel anybody had on them was from satellite images or from when Australian and American Sailors were allowed to walk the upper decks and see only what you could see from satellite imagery.

When one warship hosts another, some things that are expected. There will be a party, mostly for the officers. Some token junior ranks will be invited so the officers can claim they are being fair to everybody, but in truth, most of the junior ranks there are figuratively there to be raped. As an engineer, I would work longer hours than any of the other trades while at sea. Then we get a port visit. Diplomatic visits will last up to a week, but a typical visit is three days. One day I have to help the rest of the crew store ship, one day I am refuelling the ship and one day I am turning wrenches. Canadian engineers get screwed and rarely get time off in a foreign port. One of those three days, I also have to stand a duty watch, so I have extra duties on top of my regular work. When I first joined the navy, it wasn’t so bad, but things changed.

On a diplomatic visit, I will be on duty for two days and turn wrenches two days. I also have to volunteer for at least one activity that will take a minimum of half a day. You don’t need to hear about that shit. The short of it is they rape us bad enough; there is no joy in being an engineer. This stupid party they force the junior ranks to give up what little of their precious time remains to serve drinks and other stupid shit.

One of the things you can expect from your host ship is a tour. We were the third ship that the 052Bs hosted: the other two being a USN ship and an Australian Anzacs class frigate. The Chinese had nothing good to say about either. None of the three naves toured anything but the upper decks, and from what we were told, everybody was none too friendly. The tours likely took less than 10 minutes each.

The first full day we were in port, I was duty, turning wrenches and had to give the Chinese sailors tours. Since our ships were old pieces of shit and you could find out anything you wanted to know about them by doing a cursory search online, we didn’t feel the need to hide anything. As Canadians, we were our usual over-polite selves. We met them at the ship’s brow, where they would receive a tour guide. That guide would then take the Chinese inside the ship and give them a comprehensive tour. Each compartment had a subject matter expert. My job was to give them a tour of the Machinery Control Room, and via video cameras hard mounted in the engine spaces, I showed them the machinery spaces as well.

I did say our ship was an old piece of shit, but in other ways, it was a work of art and piece of history. When Canadians built warships, we tended to create something that nobody ever thought to build before. This frigate was no exception. The first and most obvious thing was, it was the first class of ship ever to be designed to have a computerized Integrated Machinery Control System (IMCS). When I was on watch at sea, I sat in the Machinery Control Room (MCR). In the MCR, there were three battle-ready computers, any of which could control all the machinery onboard other than weapon and detection systems. One computer was for my boss. He would oversee my work and countermand my orders if he felt I was doing something wrong. He was there to liaise with the bridge, Engineering Officer and Chief Engineer should there be any emergencies. I had the big computer with three monitors, and the electrician had the third.

Needless to say, mechanically speaking, if there was anything you wanted to know about the ship, I was the guy to ask. And boy did the Chinese engineers ever have a lot of questions. Every tour, I had to cut short because the next one would be waiting in the flats.

There were two things they really had a lot of questions about. The first was IMCS. They were really interested in how it could stay running during a battle scenario. Computers do not like to be thrown about, and the data cables get severed or burnt when a ship is being shot at. I explained the triple redundancies of the system. Basically, you would need to cut the ship in half to take the entire system down, and even then, there are local terminals in the main engine spaces where you could operate the machinery if the ship was cut in half. Most of the equipment could also be operated manually.

The other thing they wanted to know about was the gearbox. It, too, was a world’s first. There are three engines on a Canadian frigate. Two are gas turbines used for maneuvering and high speed. Either engine could operate the propeller that is on the same side of the ship as it is or operate both propellers. Both turbines can also be run at the same time for increased power output. Then there was the diesel engine for economical sailing. It could operate either or both propellers. Before the Germans and Canadians co-developed this gearbox, an engine could only operate one propeller. If you lost that engine, you lost that propeller.

I did my best to answer all their questions, but there wasn’t enough time.

That night, when I got a chance to talk to the guys that went on the tour of the Chinese ships, they said how disappointed they were. They only got a tour of the upper decks.

The guys from the combat department were impressed. The Chinese ship had 16 YJ-83s. I know that means nothing to you. At the time, the USN, RAN and Canadian Navy used Harpoon. A Harpoon has a range of 124 km. It is radar-guided, so there is a radar lock when it is fired. The YJ-83 is a Chinese build of a Russian missile. It has a range of 180km and just as big of a warhead. The difference is The Chinese ship doesn’t need a radar lock; they only need a general direction of your ship. They don’t even need to know how far away you are. The missile has an onboard combat computer and can talk with other missiles that have a similar computer. You can fire a volley of these missiles, and if they come across a fleet of enemy ships, they will prioritize targets and send an appropriate amount of missiles to each vessel, based on the size and class of each ship. Larger vessels and ships of a higher priority would have more missile incoming.

Another crazy thing about their missiles was a western destroyer or frigate typically carried 8 anti-ship missiles. This thing had 16. When our combat guys saw it, they came back saying shit like, “I hope we never have to fight them.”

The next day, I was forced to go on a tour of their ship. As soon as we got there they apologized. The ranking officer stepped forward and said, “We so embarrassed. We thought you only show us top side of boat. That why we only show you top side. Today, you get good tour.” We were going to be the first white men to set foot inside a Type 052B Destroyer.

From the outside, their ship was impressive. It was the newest most advanced ship China would admit to owning. We knew they already built the 051C, 052C and 052D, but they were still top secret, and we weren’t supposed to know they existed yet. I cannot emphasize enough how impressive this ship looked from the outside.

The problem with looking at the outside of the ship is you have no clue what is hooked up to the dishes and whips. You can guess at the range of detection equipment, but there is no way to know for sure. The first thing they showed us was the war room, where all the combat and detection computers are. You could see our guys from the combat department visibly relax as soon as they had seen it. I had no clue what I was looking at, but could tell by the reaction of my ship-mates that it was nowhere near as impressive as what was mounted on the outside of the ship.