On 4th June we’ve tracked the first mission of the German Navy Lockheed P-3C “Orion” (60+05) employed as IRINI asset.
Today we’ve tracked the same aircraft making a similar mission: the Orion is departed at 07:22 CEST from NAS Nordholz. The aircraft is landed in Munich at 08:40 CEST and after a stop of less than 2 hours, it’s departed again at 10:20 CEST southbound.
The Orion is disappeared from all tracking sites at 11:49 CEST when it was in flight near Naples southbound.
As you can see below, the mission of 4th June had a similar scheduling and the aircraft was trackable again around 17:00 CEST when it was in flight to Germany.
Considering that, compared to the last tracked position, for the nearest mission area it takes just under an hour of flight , the aircraft remained in the mission area no more than two hours.
The entire mission therefore included about 12 hours of “ferry” flight (in addition to 2 hours of technical stop) and about 2 hours of operational mission.
It is not clear why the German aircraft is not based in Sigonella as it happened for the Portuguese P-3 that participated in the Sophia mission.
This is the area of operation of IRINI.
IRINI, (Greek for “peace”), will have as its core task the implementation of the UN arms embargo through the use of aerial, satellite and maritime assets. In particular the mission will be able to carry out inspections of vessels on the high seas off the coast of Libya suspected to be carrying arms or related material to and from Libya in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2292 (2016).
Below you can see the video of the departure of the first mission from Germany