Page 53 - Australian Defence Magazine March 2019

“There’s nothing about aluminium that says you can’t sail it as hard as you can sail a steel ship. You just have to make sure you’ve designed for that level. You build out of aluminium to optimise weight, which gives you efficiency, speed and range and you make sure the aluminium on the vessel is as thin and light as you possibly can, commen- surate with the role of the vessel.
“With steel, you’re not optimising for weight to the same extent so you’re not trying to pare everything back to the minimum as you would do in an alumin- ium boat.
“That’s the issue – it’s a highly optimised boat for the environment it’s due to be in; if you change the environment, it can have an impact on the vessel. We recognised that the intensity of operations with Armidale was much higher than anyone had anticipated, so that factor was then built into Cape so that it is able to run for longer and faster in a more effective way than Armidale was designed to do.”
The single difference between the ABF and RAN Cape class boats is in the two 7.3 metre Gemini RHIBS that each carry; the RAN utilises twin diesel outboards while ABF boats have an inboard configuration.
“The Border Force program went from beginning to end in about three-and-a-half
years and when we started deliver-
ies we were knocking them out ev-
ery eight or nine weeks,” Singleton
said. “The manufacturing perfor-
mance improved dramatically through the program; we spent about 25 per cent less hours on the final boat than we did on the first-of-type.”
Lessons from the Armidale program have been implemented in the support for all 10 Cape Class boats. Austal as designer and constructor is responsible for sustainment of the eight ABF boats under a five-year contract out to 2019. A separate $18 mil- lion three-year contract for the two RAN vessels was signed in October 2017.
With the Armidales, design and con- struction was undertaken by Austal but as a sub-contractor to Defence Maritime Ser- vices – later Serco – who were also responsi- ble for sustainment. Serco ended their loss- making in-service support role in 2017, five years early, and were replaced by Thales for whom now Austal acts as a sub-contractor in a number of areas. Work on this contract is predominantly done out of Darwin, a challenging environment for weather alone.
Dave Shiner, Austal’s head of Inservice Support, says contracted availability of around 300 days a year is achieved through
planning, configuration and technical management, and scheduled and unsched- uled support.
Although the commercial language of the two agreements is different, both in- volve similar services and support utilising workforces in Darwin for Navy and Dar- win or Cairns for the ABF.
Two-day service visits normally occur on weekends. An annual four-week main- tenance activity generally takes place at Henderson, WA as does an extended main- tenance period every five years which takes anywhere between 12 to 16 weeks to com- plete depending on a variety of factors. The first of these has just been completed and focused on overhauling major equipment as well as undertaking a structural survey.
“In the past 18 months to two years we’re created an organisation that has the ability to deliver the same outcome on the same commercial basis at any of those locations,” Shiner explained to ADM. “That enables us to deliver a seamless level of support to our sustainment customers whether they’re on the east coast, the west coast or up north.”
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“The navy personnel who go
from Armidale to Cape can see the linkages but can also see the tremendous improvements.”