JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Searching for enemy submarines is just one of many missions the U.S. Navy hopes will be strengthened by a new military maintenance facility that opened at Cecil Airport in Jacksonville last week.
Navy sailors there say the new facility will increase security on the First Coast and throughout the United States.
"In this aircraft, we're flying like 8 to 12 hours a day," Tyler Touchstone, an electric warfare operator said. "So, it's a lot of time inside of an aircraft."
Touchstone says it won't be long before the Navy's P-8A Poseidon is back in the air. His mission – inside the P-8A — often entails assisting with search and rescues, while keeping an eye out for adversary or enemy submarines.
"With the vast movements that they do, our role has become more and more increasingly important over the years as tensions continue to rise," Touchstone told First Coast News.
Touchstone and others at the facility are tasked with finding anything that may pose a threat to the nation's security. And now five deployments later, Touchstone says the number of adversary submarines they're detecting are more than ever.
In a 2023 report from the Department of Defense, it lists tensions with countries like China, saying they are the most "comprehensive and serious challenge to United States national security" because of their enhanced technology. Russia, Iran and North Korea were also listed as persistent threats.
To improve a Naval aircraft like the P-8A, the three bases in Jacksonville are teaming up with the two new Boeing repair facilities at the Cecil Airport.
"24 hours a day, circling the globe, looking for hostile activity," Jacksonville Aviation Authority Mark Vanloh said. "It's very important for them to be able to come home to Jacksonville at night, land at Cecil, get some repairs done and get back out," he added.
Along with testing out new technology developed by Boeing to help Touchstone and his crew identify more adversary submarines they can't see underwater, some of the people repairing the aircrafts used to work on planes like the P-8A.
"We're about 60% veterans, we recruit locally and abroad, [and] folks experienced with the Boeing platforms," Boeing site leader Rhiannon Sherrard said.
The Navy says the overall hope is to use the knowledge from both active-duty servicemen and veterans to develop more up-to-date technology to best defend the U.S. borders.