Page 52 - Australian Defence Magazine March 2019

SECURITY
BORDER PROTECTION
Cape class applies lessons learned
JULIAN KERR | SYDNEY
Five years after the first Cape Class patrol boat entered service with what is now the Australian Border Force (ABF), the 10-strong fleet has consolidated its reputation as a reliable, hard-working responder to maritime security threats within and beyond Australia’s 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone.
ALTHOUGH funding levels for sustain- ment of the ABF fleet remain an issue, the first international sale of the Cape class is expected to be inked by mid-year, the de- sign forms the basis of a larger Offshore Patrol Vessel (OPV) under offer to the Phil- ippines by designer and shipbuilder Austal, and anti-mine warfare and maritime secu- rity variants are under consideration.
Selected in June 2011 as the preferred bidder for a $350 million program to con- struct eight of the class for what was then the Australian Customs and Border Protec- tion Service, Austal delivered the 58-metre, aluminium-hulled vessels on time and on budget, the last in August 2015.
A $63 million contract for two addition- al Cape class boats, this time for the RAN, was signed three months later and the two vessels, Cape Fourcroy and Cape Inscrip- tion, were delivered in April and May 2017. Unusually, these were funded by National Bank Australia and chartered to the Com- monwealth for a minimum of three years.
Should Defence return the boats at the conclusion of the charter term and NAB exercises its residual value guarantee option, Austal will purchase the vessels at a pre- agreed price.
Although the fact that the Cape class was acquired to replace the Austal-constructed aluminium-hulled 38.2 metre Bay class in Customs service was clearly of benefit, the new design was primarily informed by the RAN’s aluminium-hulled 56.8 metre Arm-
idale-class patrol boat fleet, itself designed and constructed by Austal and evolved in part from the Bay class, the previous fleet operated by Customs.
“We sat down internally and did all the lessons learnt and then we undertook a very extensive similar activity with Border Force and Navy, and then followed that with an- other exercise with Navy – how would we get more space, how would we get more ca- pability, what were the things that worked well and the things that didn’t work well,” Austal Chief Executive Officer David Sin- gleton explained to ADM. “With Border Force, we focused particularly on the pro- cedures for the boarding parties manning the two RHIBs at the stern – how do they receive their orders, how do they get to the RHIBs, how do they prepare and conduct a deployment, how do they ensure there is no cross-contamination.
“The Cape class is of similar size to the Armidale but it’s got a lot more volume and capability. The navy personnel who go from Armidale to Cape can see the linkages but can also see the tremendous improvements.”
The comparative values between the Ar- midale and Cape classes are striking. Al- though Cape class is only two metres longer, it offers 30 per cent more internal volume, can carry 40 per cent more transportees in better comfort, and operates with 21 rather than up to 29 crew. Its range of 4,000 nauti- cal miles at 12 knots is 20 per cent greater than that of an Armidale, and top speed of
26 knots for the same displacement is five per cent faster.
Stability is enhanced by a motion control system consisting of two roll fins and two trim flaps, and ventilation in machinery and internal spaces has been optimised by modelling air flow using computational flu- id dynamics. Importantly, reliability levels have been significantly improved.
Given the hull cracking experienced by the Armidale fleet, the structural strength of the Cape class was increased to take into account what Singleton describes as a dif- ferent operating environment.
“It wasn’t that people made errors in the Ar- midale’s design, it’s just that the design didn’t match the environment that the boat found itself in,” Singleton comments in a reference to the high tempo of asylum-seeker missions, often in heavy seas, between 2008 and 2013.
“The boats were often driven harder and faster than was originally anticipated. Nor- mally with a vessel you would provide an operational envelope, and with a particular wave height you would go at a particular maximum speed.
“But when people are in a sinking boat off the Australian coast in three-metre waves they go as fast as they possibly can to help those people.
52 | March 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au