A Navy official earlier this month confirmed the service is starting a series of tests on the first Orca Extra large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (XLUUV) and is confident in the producer of the full five ordered robotic submarines.
Capt. Scot Searles, program manager, Unmanned Maritime Systems, told attendees at a January 10 briefing during the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium that he considers the Orca an 85-ton, 85-feet long unmanned diesel electric submarine.
“They don’t like me to call it that. It’s an extra large UUV. But let’s be honest, it’s 85 tons, it’s an unmanned submarine. Very complex piece of equipment, very hard work to get where we’re at today.”
Boeing [BA], the prime contractor for the Orca program, delivered the first engineering development model (EDM) vehicle, dubbed the XLEO, last month (Defense Daily, Dec. 20, 2023).
HII [HII is Boeing’s partner for the Orca project. The vehicles will have a modular payload and support communications, mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.
The company started in-water testing the vehicle in cooperation with the Navy last spring near Boeing’s Huntington Beach, Calif. facility.
Searles said the XLEO has been through its risk reduction trials and the Navy is testing it at Huntington Beach as well, with tests scheduled to continue in January.
“It’s got 15, 16 more trials planned. So it’s 16 test periods, each one’s its own underway.”
He said the tests are focusing on a litany of things like obstacle avoidance and mission profiles.
Searles insisted this testing regime will “go test every single sensor that is onboard, the performance of every sensor that’s onboard. And then is it behaving as it needs to in the tactical operating environment? So going beyond just, we know all the surfaces work, propulsion works, we drive it around, we can send it a mission and then drive itself autonomously – check. Now give it to me. Now let me go play with it in the real environment. So all of that is risk reduction.”
The full order of five Orcas are still designated for as a “Joint Emergent Operational Need,” or JEON, and Searles said they “are still on track for delivery at the end of this year.”
However, he admitted there is schedule pressure on the five main Orcas with delays in construction.
“I’ll be completely transparent. You know, it has been a challenge with some of the quality issues we’ve had along the way. We’ve learned a lot. There’s a lot of titanium built into these vessels and that’s not a forgiving material to work with. I will tell you…we’re very thrilled with our prime [contractor], it’s been very aggressive in getting after, correcting everything we found.”
“I as much as anybody would have liked to have not had any of those problems. But when you do have them, what you do expect is for industry to go figure it out and fix it. And I would tell you Boeing has done a fantastic job getting after it,” he continued.
A 2022 Government Accountability Office report said the XLUUV program is about three years behind schedule with significant cost overruns due to poor business planning, including no requirements for Boeing to demonstrate its readiness to build the Orca to the Navy’s configuration. This has resulted in significant changes from the base design (Defense Daily, Set. 29, 2022).
Orca is based on Boeing’ Echo Voyager XLUUV concept that the company started testing in 2017. That vehicle accumulated over 10,000 hours of operating at sea, including autonomous testing.