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Surveillance Australia Pty Ltd (SAPL), also known as Cobham Special Mission, is an aviation company headquartered in Adelaide and is a subsidiary of Leidos Australia. It conducts fixed-wing airborne maritime surveillance services on behalf of the Australian Border Force.

Operations
SAPL primarily conducts airborne maritime surveillance patrols under the auspice of Maritime Border Command (MBC). Flying more than 14,000 hours a year, SAPL has played a major role in several border protection operations, directly contributing to over 200 foreign fishing vessels being apprehended and destroyed for illegally fishing for shark fin, reef fish and dolphins in Australian waters each year.

History
In 1994, the Australian Customs Service awarded National Jet Systems (NJS) the contract to conduct fixed-wing aerial maritime surveillance as part of the Coastwatch service. A new business entity was created and called Surveillance Australia Pty Ltd. which was responsible fo

In 2005, Surveillance Australia was awarded the A$1 billion Coastwatch contract that will see its aircraft operating through to 2020. This contract saw operations be restricted to only 10 de Havilland Canada Dash 8 aircraft, retiring the previously mixed fleet including the Reims F406 Caravan II. This contract was due to be succeeded by the 2018 announcement by the Australian Government for the Future Maritime Surveillance Capability (FMSC), followed by an RFI release in October 2018.

Fleet and bases
Headquartered in Adelaide, the company has three operational bases in Cairns, Darwin and Broome. It operates a fleet of six DHC-8-202 and four larger DHC-8-315 'Dash 8s' modified for maritime patrol and surveillance. One further Dash 8 was formerly configured for the LADS contract. This aircraft has now been de-configured, and is stored at Cobham's Adelaide base.

The surveillance aircraft are equipped with Raytheon SeaVue surface search radars with additional Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Moving target indication (MTI) capability, advanced electro-optical sensors and sophisticated communications suites. They can operate day and night close to land below lowest safe altitude. These aircraft can search an area of 110,000 km² per flight.

A state of the art surveillance information management (SIM) system, able to integrate surveillance and communication and provide real time communications to Customs headquarters in Canberra is due to be installed and operational by October 2008.

Fleet
Surveillance Australia operate this LADS-equipped de Havilland Canada Dash 8, VH-LCL. Surveillance Australia fleet currently operates 10 aircraft:


 * 2 Bombardier DHC-8-202 Dash 8 (as of August 2019)
 * 4 de Havilland Canada DHC-8-202 Dash 8 (as of August 2019)
 * 3 Bombardier DHC-8-315 Dash 8 (as of August 2019)
 * 1 de Havilland Canada DHC-8-315 Dash 8 (as of August 2019)