The $35 billion, brand-new airplane that the U.S. Navy wants as its primary hunter of enemy submarines is getting its first workout doing something very different. The Navy has deployed its Boeing P-8A Poseidon to the Indian Ocean to look for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, using its advanced sensors to try and spot any debris on the ocean from a possible crash.
Late last week, the Navy said it was sending one Poseidon to Kuala Lumpur from Okinawa, the Japanese island where six of them were deployed last November on the airplane’s first operational engagement. Taking off from Malaysia’s capital, the Poseidon has been patrolling the skies over the eastern Indian Ocean, looking for signs of the missing Boeing 777.
For the P-8A, built by the Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA) to find and sink submarines and ships, the assignment is a chance to prove itself at sea surveillance, after a lackluster debut led the Pentagon to pan its new plane as ineffective.
The 2013 annual report by Michael Gilmore, chief of the Pentagon testing office, was leaked before publication to Bloomberg News, which published in January a story that called the current version of the Poseidon ineffective. According to the report, the Poseidon has deficiencies in some of its systems that make it “not effective for the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission" as well as "not effective for wide area anti-submarine search,” which is its primary role.
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