The Air Force’s E-11A airborne communications relay planes have been known as “WiFi within the sky” for his or her ability to share battlefield data with faraway aircraft in addition to troops on the bottom, including across the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan for which they were developed.
The aircraft, a modified Bombardier business jet outfitted with Northrop Grumman’s Battlefield Airborne Communications Node payload, or BACN, is lesser known than the Air Force’s stalwart fleet of bombers, fighters and cargo jets. Now, with U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, the E-11 has taken on a brand new behind-the-scenes role supporting the multinational mission to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Since March, the 430th Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron, the one unit within the Air Force to fly the aircraft, has supported greater than 30 of the service’s airdrops in Gaza while operating out of an undisclosed location in U.S. Central Command. Pilots with the squadron who spoke with Air Force Times in an interview declined to debate specific missions, but offered transient insights into their work within the region.
The Air Force has participated in 40 airdrops alongside coalition partners since March. Those missions were paused for greater than a month as Israel’s invasion of the town of Rafah began in early May. The U.S. flew its most up-to-date airdrop June 9.
“The BACN mission provides the Air Force, in addition to joint and international partners, line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight interoperability, and that’s between dissimilar platforms with various electronic capabilities,” 430th EECS Commander Lt. Col. R. Clayton “Vector” McCart said. “We capture, translate, mix and, ultimately, relay and extend legacy and modern comms and data links.”
Meaning flagging potential threats to the cargo aircraft ferrying shipments of food, any course corrections or other essential details from mission planners and other troops around the world.
In a region as large as CENTCOM, airdrops may be derailed by a lot of variables, from weather to other flight questions of safety. The BACN aircraft, which carries two pilots, can quickly relay real-time changes coming from the Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar to mission partners on the front lines.
“We will monitor progress in a way that other platforms may not give you the chance to see … so far as locations of the assets, the weather calls, etc. Weather plays a giant consider the airdrops off the coast of Gaza,” Capt. Britton “Rad” Ellington, an E-11A pilot who previously flew the service’s now-retired E-8C Joint Surveillance Goal Attack Radar System, or JSTARS, aircraft, said.
With a variety of greater than 6,900 miles and a typical sortie time of around 10 hours, the aircraft can take over where satellite phones fail, and interpret transmissions between the military’s myriad communications systems that may’t otherwise connect. While AFCENT declined to say how lots of the service’s seven E-11As are operating in theater, the 430th acts as a knowledge lilypad for greater than 1,000 hours every two weeks.
“We’re just not relegated to an airdrop. For example, we could try this as an element of a bigger expectation from CENTCOM leadership, and just move across the battlespace. … We’re probably not tethered to anyone location,” McCart said.
The E-11A is within the technique of establishing its recent home at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, inside the 18th Airborne Command and Control Squadron. It’s one in every of 4 missions replacing JSTARS planes at Robins over the subsequent several years; the squadron is anticipated to turn into fully operational by 2027.
The 430th EECS, which deploys out of the Middle East, and doubles as a training unit, will shift its training mission to Robins.
“Every sortie is a training sortie, within the sense that we learn on daily basis that we fly,” McCart said.
Courtney Mabeus-Brown is the senior reporter at Air Force Times. She is an award-winning journalist who previously covered the military for Navy Times and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where she first set foot on an aircraft carrier. Her work has also appeared in The Recent York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and more.