A small team of personnel from the Poseidon Tactical Operations Centre (TOC) at RAF Lossiemouth have played a pivotal role in ensuring mission success on Exercise Rim of the Pacific 2024 (RIMPAC) in Hawaii.
Comprising of mission support staff, communications engineers, and a cadre of intelligence personnel, the TOC team have been supporting daily exercise flying.
“When an aircraft gets airborne we provide real world pre-mission support. We then monitor the flights in real time and are there when our crews return to analyse and record data.
We’re looking at imagery and acoustic intelligence, what we can see and what we can record beneath the surface. We may be analysing sub service data and information which may be a marine mammal or may be a submarine. It takes a lot of skill from our analysts to determine and delineate.”
Flight Lieutenant McKay
A Flight Commander
For some on the 12 strong deployed team it’s been their first overseas exercise and working in the Pacific has proven excellent training. RIMPAC is the region's largest maritime exercise with over 25,000 personnel and 40 ships and submarines involved.
“We didn’t realise how beneficial this would be. The command chain both above and below us here is dramatically different. We have to try and understand what exactly they want, what they’re asking for, and how they would like us to deliver as their customer.”
Flight Lieutenant McKay
Resolving such issues has been helped by having RAF personnel embedded within the exercise control staff. “We’ve been able to discuss the intricacies of information flow, and how we receive and disseminate information differently on the exercise. The team have done exceptionally well.”
For Sergeant Harbor, Deputy Misson Manager in the TOC, RIMPAC has paid dividends: “We’ve got a small team here and we’ve definitely gelled to operate as a single unit to directly support the flying. The exercise has been hard work with long days, and the roles we’ve been fulfilling have been different to home.”
“It’s been an amazing experience. In the downtime we’ve had we’ve met up with our counterparts from the other nations we’re working with and seen some of the island.”
Sergeant Harbor
Deputy Mission manager in the TOC
