For decades, one of the most unusual aircraft at Naval Air Station Patuxent River has been a heavily modified, four-engine turboprop that spent its days flying into hurricanes, mapping war zones and carrying experiments no ordinary patrol plane would touch.
On Sept. 22, the last of them left.
The Naval Research Laboratory’s Scientific Development Squadron ONE, VXS-1, known as the Warlocks, sent off the Navy’s last active-duty P-3 Orion on the East Coast. It flew to the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, the military’s aircraft storage yard widely known as “the boneyard,” for long-term preservation. Five days earlier, on Sept. 17, the squadron held a ceremony at Pax River to honor the Orion’s research career and introduce its replacement, the MC-12S Super King Air.
“The P-3 Orion has served as the cornerstone of our heavy-lift, long endurance airborne naval science, bridging the gap between laboratory concepts and frontline Fleet capabilities,” said Capt. Randy Cruz, NRL’s commanding officer. “While we celebrate the aircraft’s extraordinary service from combat route clearance to hurricane reconnaissance, the arrival of the MC-12S Super King Air ensures our team continues to deliver agile, high-altitude test capabilities to the warfighter.”
The Navy’s flying laboratory
VXS-1 is not a typical Navy squadron. It is the airborne research arm of the Naval Research Laboratory, the Navy’s main science lab, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Its job is to take nearly any sensor, antenna or instrument a scientist can dream up, bolt it onto an aircraft, and fly it.
“We have a different mission set than that of most other Navy squadrons,” said Cmdr. Andrew R. Vawter, who took command in March as the squadron’s 18th commanding officer. “We are tasked to operate highly modified aircraft that are designed to receive nearly any kind of equipment or sensor and install and operate it, test it, or gather technical data with it, rapidly. This unique mission set is both more broad and more niche than that of traditional test and well outside that of Fleet VP [Patrol] squadrons.”
The unit traces its roots to January 1963, when NRL formed a Flight Support Detachment flying Lockheed EC-121 Super Constellations, recognizable by their orange-and-white paint. The detachment later moved to P-3 Orions and was redesignated VXS-1 in December 2004. Its long-running projects included Project Magnet, which mapped variations in Earth’s magnetic field. By the Navy’s count, the squadron has flown nearly 78,000 hours without a Class A mishap.
The Orion itself dates back even further. The P-3 first flew in 1959, joined the fleet in August 1962, and within two months was flying blockade patrols during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Navy’s last active-duty patrol squadron gave up the Orion for the P-8 Poseidon in 2020, leaving research and test units like VXS-1 among the last to fly it.
From roadside bombs to hurricane eyes
Capt. Mark Zematis, then commanding officer of NAS Pax River, spoke at the ceremony about the aircraft’s place in naval history. He handed over command of the base a week later.
“When you think about American sea power, minds often race toward carrier decks – to strike fighters and bombers,” Zematis said. “But over six decades, the true sentinels of the global commons were not catapulted from flight decks. It was that aircraft there, launched from coastal runways, climbing into fog and squall on the muscle of four Allison T56 turboprops, carrying 11 crew members into the vast expanse of ocean.”
VXS-1’s Orions carried that work over land, too. In Afghanistan, the squadron flew counter-IED missions supporting coalition troops. “Hovering out of audible range, Orion crews used their camera and communication suites to identify roadside IED emplacements, trace vehicle convoys, and pipe real-time video directly into tactical operations centers,” Zematis said. The squadron also flew aerogeophysical surveys of the country. In the 2006 “Rampant Lion” campaign alone, it mapped roughly two-thirds of Afghanistan.
Closer to home, the squadron flew its NP-3 into Hurricanes Idalia in 2023 and Francine in 2024, often on short notice. Crews dropped atmospheric sensors and sonobuoys to measure conditions where the ocean meets the storm, and beamed the data straight into Navy weather models and national forecasting systems.
“Platforms come and go, but true legends are distinguished by their refusal to become obsolete,” Zematis said. “Every sonobuoy dropped, every periscope tracked, every overland convoy escorted, and every data packet downlinked carries the fingerprint of Naval Air Station Patuxent River.”
Meet the MC-12S
The Orion’s replacement is smaller and nimbler. The MC-12S Super King Air is a military version of the Beechcraft King Air twin turboprop, set up as a flying test bench.
How the two compare:
- Altitude: the NP-3C topped out at 30,000 feet. The MC-12S reaches 35,000 feet, which matters for testing sensors that need to see a wide area.
- Endurance: the NP-3C could stay up for as long as 12 hours. The MC-12S flies five to seven hours per mission, at speeds from 125 to 263 knots indicated airspeed.
- Cabin: the MC-12S uses an “easy-on, easy-off” modular layout with reconfigurable equipment racks and workstations, and supplies more than 11 kilowatts of dedicated power for experiments.
- Sensor mounts: it has a large configurable belly radome, an extended nose that holds a retractable camera turret, and external mounts for GPS, Iridium and Starshield satellite antennas.
“Our aircrews and project engineers demand a platform that can adapt to rapid technological change without compromising safety,” Vawter said. “The MC-12S Super King Air offers the precise modularity and high-altitude reach our teams require to test next-generation sensors in demanding real-world environments.”
The squadron makes its aircraft available to researchers across the military, other federal agencies, universities and private industry. They can fly custom sensors without buying and modifying an airplane of their own.
