Talk:Scout plane

Patrol planes
The Wikipedia is missing an article on the patrol plane, a rather important topic not only in antisubmarine warfare, but also in other important forms of naval warfare.

There are two approches to correcting this: A. Information on the large two-engine, and often four-engine patrol planes could be added to this article, and then "patrol plane" could be redirected here. B. An article on "patrol plane"s could be added to the Wikipedia.

Patrol planed do not do only antisubmarine warfare. The also do scounting for enemy surface warships and task forces, and for enemy merchant ships - so that attacks can be called in on them by bombers, friendly submarines, and surface warships. Patrol planes also make a large number of weather reports, especially reports of tropical storms, hurricanes, and typhoons. Patrol planes also do search and rescue missions, looking for both sailors from sunk or damaged ships, and aviators from shot down, crashed, or ditched airplanes. Patrol planes also search for icebergs on oceans where those area problem, especially on the North Atlantic Ocean and the North Pacific Ocean, and sometimes around Antarctica. Some patrol planes also carry powerful weapons for attacking enemy surface ships, including aerial bombs, air-to-surface missiles such as the Maverick missile, and the Harpoon missile.

The big patrol planes have been both seaplanes and land planes. Prominent seaplanes that did this patrol duty included the Short Sunderland, the PBY Catalina, the Kawanishi H6K "Mavis", the Kawanishi H8K "Emily", the Martin Mariner, and the Martin Mars. Prominent land planes that did/do this patrol duty, and some included in present-day armed forces, include the B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, PB4Y Privateer, Focke-Wulf 200 Condor, the P2V Neptune, the B-29 Superfortress, the P-3 Orion, the B-52 Stratofortress, and the CP-140 Aurora.

In addition, there are modern, long-range, wheeled planes that are flown from aircraft carriers and which perform the missions of both scout planes and patrol planes. There is only one kind of these which is prominent now: one flown from the carriers of the U.S. Navy, and it has been in service for decades. This is the S-3 Viking plane, and it serves the purposes of antisubmarine warfare, scouting for enemy (and allied) ships, search and rescue, and attacking enemy surface ships.

For these purposes, the S-3 Viking can carry a wide variety of sensors and weapons: sonobuoys, radar, magnetic anomaly detectors, infrared dectectors, homing torpedoes (the Mark 46), bombs/depth charges, and antiship missiles, the Harpoon missile. There are probably others that I don't know about.

98.81.13.169 (talk) 01:14, 12 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Maritime patrol aircraft. - BilCat (talk) 03:54, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

one dubious source from the web
and the writer of this page completely misunderstands "scout", which has little to do with reconnaissance, otherwise there wouldn't have been a need to use both the scout and observation mission designations together on the OS2U. A scout trainer (ie SNJ) is not a reconnaissance aircraft either, nor is a scout bomber (the SBD carried no reconnaissance equipment). Scout in this case derives from a scout cruiser's role - namely running interference (or screening) as an escort to prevent enemy reconnaissance from happening - with any reconnaissance roles have been superseded by aircraft.&#32;- NiD.29 (talk) 04:38, 23 December 2023 (UTC)