Planning for Pitch Black

Read any press release about Exercise Pitch Black 2026 currently underway in the Top End and the statistics will be impressive.

For example, 21 countries are attending the exercise and 13 of those are contributing combat jets and/or support aircraft; around 100 of those assets could be flying missions with and against each other in the vast airspace south of Darwin on any given day. The exercise also plays host to around 2,500 personnel – all of which must to be accommodated and fed over the three-week period; Aircraft fuel supplies need to be ordered, delivered and dispensed at rates greater than the normal day to day operations; security needs to be increased; aircraft spare parts and ground support equipment prepositioned and serviced – the list goes on.

Pitch Black is one of the largest Large Force Employment (LFE) exercises in the world, so how does the Royal Australian Air Force and its partners prepare for such an event and how long does the process take?

“It’s a significant muscle move to pick up an air combat capability and move it halfway around the world. So, we want to make sure that their investment in the exercise has appropriate outcomes, and they get the learning out of it that they need,” Pitch Black 2026 Exercise Commander, Air Commodore Matt McCormack explained.

“So, we take in all those inputs from other nations about what they want to get out of it, we put it all together and then we try and create the sandpit to play in to ensure that they meet the majority of their objectives.”

Planning for Pitch Black 2026 began shortly after the conclusion of the previous exercise in August 2024 and the formal process begins with an invitation from the Chief of Air Force to his or her international counterparts. This process leverages the security arrangements in place between Australia and its partners and once the likely attendees are known, RAAF planners put together a plan which accommodates most of each nation’s sovereign requirements.

For example, for Pitch Black 2026, the Spanish Air Force requested the opportunity to employ inert weapons on the Delamere Air Weapons Range, so exercise scenarios and safety procedures needed to be in place before the first jets deployed to Darwin.

“We’ll come up with a rough game plan, which is built off lessons learnt from previous Pitch Blacks, so we don’t reinvent the wheel every time. We have a look at who’s coming, what it might look like, a real in-depth review of the lessons from last time about what worked and what didn’t work, some of the difficulties, and then we come up with a game plan,” AIRCDRE McCormack continued.

“And then there’s a series of planning conferences that are undertaken with all the participants or potential participants involved - the initial planning conference, mid planning conference and final planning conference. And then through those three conferences, the scope and fidelity of the information gets narrowed down to the point where people are comfortable and they know enough of what’s going on to deploy their teams out here.”

An added complexity to this planning process over the last few years is the major capital works to improve RAAF Darwin and RAAF Tindal – the two primary air bases used in the Pitch Black series of exercises, but AIRCDRE McCormack says that these are catered for as the plan is formed.

“My experience is that really the only impact that those things have to us is how much real estate we’ve got available to put jets and people. A couple of years ago there was a large number of runway improvement and hardstand improvement works which constrained what we could normally absorb in Darwin,” he explained.

“So that was a factor in the planning. We’d look forward and consider what might be unavailable at that stage of the airfield redevelopment plan, and that would then curtail how many people we could have, and we might need to constrain participant’s footprint.”