Eyes of the Fleet - Inside the Operations Room of HMCS Fredericton
Video / May 09, 2025
Transcript
Hi there, I'm Sailor Second Class Drake MacNeil, proudly serving aboard HMCS Fredericton. And I'm going to show you a bit of what I do in a day.
As a Naval Combat Information Operator. My job is to detect, identify, disseminate and communicate information.
My goal is to identify and track a contact before they even know we’re there.
Here we have the system populating the contact. So our first step will be to make it unknown just so anyone else watching will see we've taken a look at this. We will detect contacts based off of all our sensors, be that from your radars, both our surface search and air search, as well as our electronic detection suite and visual sensors being your eyes from the bridge.
So my next step will be to verify whether this is real. Currently we have tracking on our radar. I will currently ask my electronic warfare suite, see if they have anything.
We have intelligence saying that there's hostiles towards the north and we have a fast-moving contact at 40,000 feet coming in at 500 knots. That's indicative of an aircraft coming in. Heads up north, bogey 030. So, from there its time is of the essence in order to get our response going. And yelling heads up gets everyone's attention. Shocks everyone into getting ready for the upcoming situation.
I chose to be a Naval Combat Information Operator because I got to do a little bit of everything working with everyone in the operations trade. My choices and information provided make an impact on what's going on in the here and now. I have my finger on the pulse of operations. I get to see everything that's going on and gets the adrenaline going.