Page 60 - Australian Defence Magazine October 2019

PACIFIC
HUNTER CLASS
“The first three ships of the Hunter class will carry the names of three major Australian regions, all with strong historical maritime and naval ties.”
A lot of the lessons learned from the AWD build are being applied to Hunter.
monwealth and industry,” he said to ADM. “We signed the contract in December 2018 and we’re really only eight months into the program, but we’ve mobilised very rapidly. We have over 400 people in the Hunter program right now and we have 50 people seconded to the UK Type 26 team in Glasgow, both managing the evolution of the design maturity and managing the transfer of technology from Glasgow over
to ASC Shipbuilding.”
Global Combat Ship heritage
According to the Royal Navy, the Type 26 is designed “without compromise” to ex- cel in the ASW role, as a successor to the Type 23 frigates. The UK Government announced in the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) that it would acquire eight ‘advanced ASW ships’ and in 2017, BAE Systems was awarded a ₤3.7 billion contract for the construction of the first three ships.
Plate steel for the appropriately named HMS Glasgow was cut at BAE’s shipyard in Govan, on the banks of the River Clyde on July 20, 2017 and is due to enter the water in the 2019-2020 timeframe, prior to enter- ing service in the middle of the decade.
HMS Cardiff will enter the water about two years behind her sister ship and the first steel for her was cut at Govan on Au- gust 14. A UK Government decision on the second batch of five ships is expected around the time Glasgow is launched.
The UK ships are 149 metres long, with a beam of 20.8 metres and displace around 6,900 tonnes. A standard crew will com- prise 157 personnel, including an em- barked aviation element, but the ship has enough accommodation space to embark up to 208 people.
According to BAE Systems the frig- ate is ‘an advanced ASW warship de- signed for the critical protection of the Continuous At Sea Deterrent and Car- rier Strike Group’. In simple terms, this translates to providing protection for the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine deter- rent force (currently Vanguard and later Dreadnought class boats) and the two new 65,000-tonne Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers.
With ASW as their primary role, signa- ture management is a very important con- sideration and every component within the ship is designed with this philosophy in mind. Its primary ASW sensors will be an upgraded version of Thales’ 2087 towed array low frequency active and passive
When announcing the GCS-A as the preferred design, then Defence Minister Marise Payne said the GCS-A design was selected because it represented the most capable ASW platform.
“This is decision based entirely on capa- bility; the best capability to equip Navy in Anti-Submarine Warfare, with range and endurance to operate either independently or as part of a task group,” she said.
Payne also revealed that government- owned ASC Shipbuilding would become a subsidiary of BAE Systems during the
On October 5, 2018, the Common- wealth signed an interim Advanced Work Arrangement (AWA), with BAE Systems Australia to enable the company to contin- ue with workforce mobilisation activities. This contract also represented the initial step towards transitioning ASC Ship- building into BAE Systems for the dura- tion of the Hunter project.
The Head Contract between ASC Ship- building, as the prime contractor, and the Commonwealth was signed at Osborne on December 14, 2018, at which time the
Hunter class build program, with the Commonwealth owning a sovereign share in the entity but reverting to government ownership at the end of the project.
“We were really pleased with that as an outcome, because ASC has great capabili- ty. We always wanted to use the workforce, but this allows us to join ASC and BAE together much earlier and we think that will be very positive,” explained BAE Sys- tems’ then Global Maritime Systems busi- ness development director, Nigel Stewart.
“We cut steel for the first Type 26 in the UK in June 2017 and we’ll cut steel for full production of the Hunter class in 2022.”
government estimated Sea 5000 would contribute around $17 billion to the na- tional economy and have create over 6,300 jobs by the program’s peak in 2028.
Speaking in late August, Craig Lock- hart, ASC Shipbuilding’s managing di- rector, said the build program is currently on track.
“We’re exactly where we thought we would be in the program, bang on sched- ule, after coming through the preferred tenderer announcement in June 2018, to achieve contract signature in December – something I believe is a gold standard in terms of negotiation between the Com-
60 | October 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
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