While Exercise Pitch Black 2024 has been the largest in the series to date, with 150 aircraft from more than 16 countries and around 4,000 personnel descending on Australia’s Top End, the next exercise could be larger still.
Speaking at a post-exercise press conference at RAAF Base Darwin on 2 August, Officer Conducting Pitch Black 2024, Air Commodore Peter Robinson, predicted that greater use of other bases – including RAAF Tindal, near Katherine – could provide for future growth.
“Every Pitch Black we say that we’re not going to make it any bigger, but we’ll see how we go with Pitch Black 2026,” AIRCDRE Robinson said. “But I think we’ll probably need to utilise some other bases, because we’ve pretty much asked a lot out of the Darwin community and we’ll probably lean more into maximising Tindal Air Base – and Darwin Air Base – for the next exercise.”
Tindal is undergoing major upgrade works at the present time and these restricted the use of the base to only a handful of aircraft during Pitch Black 2024.
While the problem of accommodating the 4,000 personnel who participated in PB24 had been solved by the opening of the Defence Accommodation Precinct – Darwin (DAP-D) - the former Commonwealth Quarantine Facility at Howard Springs - aircraft parking space in Darwin remains problematic.
For the 2024 exercise for example, only one tanker aircraft was based in the Northern Territory, while the remainder – from Australia, France, Italy, Singapore, the UK and the European Multi-national MRTT Unit (MMU) - were based at RAAF Amberley in south-east Queensland. This resulted in a three-and-a-half-hour transit to and from the exercise area for each aircraft every day.
Despite these limitations, AIRCDRE Robinson said the recently concluded exercise was the most successful in its 43-year history.
“We’ve flown over 1,700 missions (and) we’ve had a success rate of about 93 per cent – and that’s a phenomenal effort, especially for the air forces that are a long way from home and have had to rely on long supply lines,” he said.
“Every wave we’ve flown, where we send off 50 aircraft, is an incredibly complex scenario to work through, when you look at the briefing, the airborne execution with different nations all contributing to those missions. That’s a huge strength of what we had in Pitch Black 2024 – and we’ve been doing that three times a day over the last two weeks.”