The P-3 Orion Was Made for Hunting Submarines

How Lockheed's P-3 kept the Cold War from turning hot.

Submarines are hard to kill. For military strategists, no warship generates as much uncertainty and trepidation as an adversary that can prowl the world’s oceans virtually undetected. As Winston Churchill confessed after World War II: “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.” 

Moscow took note. Between 1946 and 1958 alone, the Soviet Union constructed some 400 submarines. Those tasked with preparing the Soviet Union for war viewed submarines as an asset in both defending their coasts and disrupting the North Atlantic shipping lanes that would be used by the United States to support Western Europe in the event of conflict. Later, the addition of cruise missiles to the arsenals of Soviet submarines made them the preeminent tactical threat to the U.S. Navy.

 To counter the threat, the Navy saw the need for a rugged aircraft with long legs and maneuverability. The search for the right airplane started in 1957, when the Navy issued specifications for a new long-range patrol bomber. What emerged was Lockheed’s P-3 Orion, a patrol airplane derived from the company’s initially troubled L-188 Electra airliner. 

Orions would prove to be the Navy’s most potent aerial platform for countering underwater military targets. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev reportedly commented: “I always know where my submarines are. I look at where the P-3s are flying—that’s where my submarines are.”

In production for nearly 40 years, the three major versions of the 116-foot-long Orion (P-3A, P-3B, and P-3C) each featured the latest in sensors and electronics. “It’s a very long-lived airframe because of its versatility,” says Michael W. Hankins, an aeronautics curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “It’s easy to change out the electronics inside it—that let it accomplish different missions.” 

As sub hunters, the P-3 succeeded the magnificent flying boats that had once served as the eyes and ears of the Navy’s fleet in World War II. During the war, my uncle was a crewman on a Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer stationed in the South Pacific. I wanted to follow in his footsteps. That’s why, during Navy flight training in the early 1970s, while others were clamoring to fly jets, I opted for the P-3. And, like me, those who were part of the Orion community have a special appreciation for what it accomplished.

“I flew every derivative of the P-3, and you ask me what I think of the plane?” says former P-3 pilot and retired Rear Admiral James “Poopie” Schear. “I think they helped win the Cold War.”

New and Improved

Lockheed’s L-188 was specifically designed to meet the growing demands of commercial aviation. It had superb cockpit visibility, improved safety features, and a wide fuselage that made it one of the roomiest airliners of its time, capable of carrying 90 passengers. It was among the first turboprop airliners built in the United States, where airliners had previously relied mostly on piston-powered aircraft. The L-188 also had remarkable thrust, with one pilot marveling: “It climbs like a damn fighter plane!”

Due to early design flaws, however, L-188 airliners suffered a spate of fatal crashes. NASA Langley engineers eventually pinpointed the cause: whirl mode flutter, a wobbling motion created by frequency interactions between the aircraft’s large propellers and wings, which shook themselves apart in flight. Extensive modifications to the L-188’s engine mounts and wing structure adjoining the mounts solved the problem for commercial airliners.

 And Lockheed implemented further changes to make the aircraft more robust and reliable for the Navy. The fuselage was shortened by seven feet forward of the wing to save weight, while still providing sufficient room for a 12-person flight crew, bomb bay, and bulky electronics equipment. The most distinctive addition to the aircraft is its “stinger,” a magnetic anomaly detector (MAD) tail boom, which can locate slight disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by large metallic objects—such as 350-foot-long submarines.

First fielded by the Navy in 1962, 648 P-3s were built by Lockheed, and an additional 107 units were manufactured by Japan’s Kawasaki. Capable of flying 16-hour missions and with dash speeds of up to 466 mph, P-3s are faster than many World War II-era fighters. Armed with torpedoes and depth charges carried within the bomb bay—along with 10 wing hard-points for such weapons as missiles and mines—Orions remain a formidable platform for anti-submarine warfare (ASW). 

But perhaps its greatest asset is endurance. “Persistence goes a long way when hunting submarines, and that’s what P-3s had, that ability to stay over a sub for hours on end,” says Cold War-era naval flight officer Roger Warburton.

In 1968, Warburton began serving aboard P-3s with Patrol Squadron Fifty (VP-50) out of California’s Naval Air Station Moffett Field. From a console within the Orion’s windowless midsection (called “the tube” by aircrew), Warburton’s job as a tactical coordinator (TACCO) was to evaluate information from the P-3’s three sensor operators and then devise tactics to track and, if required, engage a sub. 

At the core of the P-3’s anti-submarine capability are the expendable sonobuoys ejected from the aircraft’s belly. The cylindrical sonobuoys contain radio transmitters that relay sound signals from hydrophones deployed at variable depths beneath the sonobuoys bobbing at the surface. Some sonobuoys listen passively for submarine noises so as not to alert the sub, while active sonobuoys, or pingers, emit sonar pulses to echo-range a sub’s location. Pingers are usually dropped just before an attack run. 

The Navy’s P-3As were initially pressed into service during the most tense moment of the Cold War: the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. With their long range and loiter capability, P-3As helped enforce a naval blockade around Cuba. To the Soviets, the aircraft seemed to be everywhere, not only scouting attempted entries into Cuba, but flying patrols deep into the Atlantic. It was a P-3 crew, in fact, that found and photographed a Soviet freighter returning to Russia with canisters of missiles aboard, signifying the end of the crisis.

Operation Market Time

Two years later, Orion crews found themselves flying patrols off Vietnam.

“Operation Market Time was set up to deny the North Vietnamese the ability to replenish arms and supplies,” says Schear, who as a young pilot flew with VP-50 based out of Sangley Point in the Philippines. “They were using the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through supposedly neutral Laos and Cambodia, but couldn’t move enough supplies because it was really just a muddy trail. So they used fishing boats loaded with guns and ammunition that would mix in with fishing fleets off the coast.

“A typical Market Time mission was a 10-hour flight, and there was a good chance you’d fly four, five, or six days in a row on these patrols,” continues

Schear. “All flights were done at 200 feet, and P-3s were remarkably effective because we could spend a lot of time out there. We’d slow down, get low, and use gyro-stabilized binoculars to take a look at each boat as we went by. Anything that looked suspicious, we’d call in surface ships or armed OV-10s [Broncos].”

Flying low and slow past suspect vessels was not without risk, and aircrews sometimes photographed enemy gunners pulling covers off their machine guns. Two VP-26 Orions—and their crews—were lost to anti-aircraft fire while investigating vessels near Cambodian waters.

Warburton would witness the event’s grim aftermath. He had arrived at Naval Station Sangley Point one month after a shootdown, when wreckage and items from one of the lost P-3 crews were recovered and transported to the squadron hangar back at Sangley Point. “So, here comes Roger Warburton,” he says. “I was part of an advance party from VP-50. We got to Sangley Point on May 1. They had recovered all 12 flight helmets of the crew, and as we came walking off the plane into the squadron hangar, here were the helmets lined up on the floor next to some wreckage. I realized this was real—before, you know, you heard stories. You don’t think this didn’t shake us up? 

 “We were too vulnerable to ground fire,” he continues. “The Navy didn’t anticipate Soviets subs fighting it out while surfaced, so we lacked armor or self-sealing fuel tanks in the wings.”

Retired Captain Tim Verhoef did two tours in Vietnam as a P-3 tactical coordinator. He and his crew would fly patrols along Vietnam’s 1,200-mile-long coastline looking for infiltrators. They also flew north into the Tonkin Gulf to protect the fleet from surprise attack. “You might point out that Pacific P-3 crews were basically out of the anti-submarine warfare business during Vietnam,” says Verhoef. “We were doing surveillance, we were doing photography, we got good at that. Later, I had to relearn anti-submarine warfare.”

The last U.S. ground forces left Vietnam in 1973. When Saigon fell, my squadron, VP-4, was in the process of deploying back to Naval Air Station Cubi Point in the Philippines to resume patrols over the South China Sea. That’s when we became involved in the Mayaguez incident, a battle that cost the lives of 41 U.S. servicemen. According to military aviation historian Ralph Wetterhahn, it was the last battle of the Vietnam War.

While serving with VP-4, I recall our squadron’s air intelligence officer explaining how almost every war game she took part in started with a P-3 being shot down or going missing. Whenever a crisis brewed anywhere in the world, P-3s were usually the first Navy assets deployed, and when the U.S.-flagged container ship SS Mayaguez was seized by Cambodian gunboats on May 12, 1975, and its crew held captive, P-3s launched to find the ship.

As related in Wetterhahn’s 2001 book, The Last Battle, a P-3 shadowed a large radar contact during the night that turned out to be the Mayaguez. The following dawn, another P-3 was shot in the tail by gunfire from Cambodian gunboats, but its crew still managed to visually confirm that the ship was the Mayaguez.

Joe Michelsen flew three missions as a co-pilot

during the search for the Mayaguez, and he remembers the chaos and confusion of the ensuing battle. U.S. Marines landed on Koh Tang Island, where the military believed the Mayaguez crew was being held. Three U.S. Air Force Sikorsky helicopters were shot down while bringing Marines to rescue the hostages. But it was all for naught, they weren’t on the island.

Michelsen’s crew was instrumental in finally locating the hostages. “We were flying on the east side of the Koh Tang Island, between Cambodia and the island,” says Michelsen. “We were mostly looking out for gunboats, they might be coming out after the destroyers, on suicide missions basically.”  That’s when the P-3 crew saw a boat wake heading toward the destroyers. U.S. jets were dispatched to investigate, but even flying at low altitudes between 100 and 300 feet, the jets were moving too fast for a detailed reconnaissance. A P-3 would be right for the job, though local military commanders—mindful of the two reconnaissance aircraft crews previously lost during Operation Market Time—had imposed a 6,000-foot minimum altitude restriction for the P-3s, beyond the ranges of the enemy’s .50 caliber heavy machine guns.

Since the boat hadn’t fired on the U.S. jets, the local commander authorized the P-3 crew to fly lower. After several passes, eventually descending to an altitude of around 150 feet, the P-3 reported visual confirmation of the Mayaguez crew vigorously waving white flags aboard the fishing boat. The 40 crewmen were back in friendly hands.

Cat-and-Mouse Games

While standing alert on Guam in fall 1979, Verhoef got a call at around midnight: a Soviet Echo II cruise-missile sub was spotted in the Tsushima Strait by the Japanese. Apparently, it was shadowing the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier sailing at best speed in response to the latest crisis in Iran. Verhoef, now a tactical coordinator with VP-6, was back in the anti-submarine warfare business. 

“It was raining buckets as we manned our plane and flew towards the straits,” says Verhoef. “We had the carrier on radar, and we knew they were hauling ass. Headquarters said, ‘do what you can to distract him.’ ” 

Verhoef and his crew initially stalked the Soviet sub passively. “We had good course, speed, and depth on him, and were doing MAD runs,” he says. “The Echo II popped up at dawn, and what the skipper saw through his periscope was our P-3 coming right at him on a low-level simulated attack run. He pulled the plug and went squirrelly, doing that Crazy Ivan thing, where they dive and do a turn at the same time. We went ‘active’ on him, dropped pingers, and pinged the crap out of him while doing simulated attacks. The whole crew got excited, got into it. And, yeah, we got him to detach. It was the best ASW flight of my career.”

Survival Story

Many outside the P-3 community are surprised to learn that we would regularly shut down engines inflight to save fuel and extend our time on station. We called this a “loiter shutdown,” and the aircraft flew surprisingly well on just three or sometimes even two inboard engines. The unused engines would be feathered for the duration, which meant we turned the blades so that they’d be parallel to the airflow, minimizing drag. 

Unfeathering the big four-blade propellers during the restart process was something we did routinely without issues. But for a P-3C, call-sign AF 586, flying out of Adak, Alaska, unfeathering an engine turned into a survival story. Under the command of Lieutenant Commander Jerry Grigsby—a seasoned patrol-plane commander and former flying boat pilot—AF 586 lifted off on the morning of October 26, 1978, for a nine-hour patrol west of the Aleutian Islands chain, flying into bad weather. “We weren’t worried about the storm,” says Matt Gibbons, the tactical coordinator on the flight. “The P-3 is a very good all-weather plane, so even though the storm was blowing 40-knot winds, we thought, yeah, just another typical Aleutian stormy day. Let’s go.”

However, when the cockpit crew attempted to restart the no. 1 engine—which had been shut down earlier to save fuel—things went very wrong. A malfunction resulted in a massive propeller overspeed, which cascaded into a series of engine fires, forcing Grigsby to ditch his barely controllable aircraft into mountainous seas. Gibbons had every confidence in Grigsby’s ability, and credits him with saving many lives that day. “He knew how to read the waves,” says Gibbons. “We skipped over three waves and then slammed into the fourth wave and jackknifed.” 

One crewman went down with the airplane, and Grigsby, the last man out, was unable to make it into a raft due to high wind and waves. He drifted away, despite several crewmen jumping back into the water in a desperate attempt to save him. The remaining crew members would spend 12 hours battered by frigid seas. 

In a rare moment of Cold War cooperation, Moscow responded to an urgent U.S. request for help. The Soviet trawler Mys Sinyavin—full of fish from the Bering Sea and headed toward its homeport on Sakhalin Island—was the only vessel close enough to rescue the P-3 crew. Moscow told the fishing boat to reverse course and assist in the search. The seamen from the Mys Sinyavin rescued the survivors, though three more aircrew would die of exposure, these being the young sensor operators who had reentered the water to save Grigsby. “It’s the epitome of service above self,” says Gibbons, honoring their sacrifice. 

“Until then, no one who’d flown maritime patrols from Iceland, Newfoundland, or the Aleutians had believed that anyone could survive an open-ocean ditching in winter weather,” wrote historian Andrew C.A. Jampoler in an article published in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings in 2009. “Now everyone knew you really could live through a ditching, and marveled at it.”

Beyond the Cold War

Despite occasional mishaps, P-3s remained popular among aircrews. And they would prove their worth not only in the Cold War, but beyond, excelling in a variety of tactical missions through decades of conflicts.

Within hours of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, P-3s were among the first U.S. units to respond. Equipped with powerful radars, Orions monitored Iraqi troop positions and provided targeting data for strikes against Iraqi warships. “And if you fast forward a few years to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, P-3s were important in an electronic warfare role, mostly as a way of monitoring missile sites, looking for launches and for radars,” notes Hankins. “They played an important surveillance role not just with tracking submarines but with signals intelligence.” 

Today, P-3s fly a range of missions, from aerial firefighting to hurricane hunting. “I think their civilian use is fascinating,” says Hankins. “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) uses them for atmospheric research. They have a huge scientific mission there.” NOAA’s two Lockheed WP-3D “hurricane hunters”—affectionately nicknamed Kermit (N42RF) and Miss Piggy (N43RF)—collect data at low altitudes to supplement data that can’t be gathered from ground-based radar and satellite imagery. Loaded with scientific instruments, the aircraft probe every wind and pressure change during missions that can last up to 10 hours. 

The Navy retired the P-3 from active-duty patrol squadrons in 2019, replacing them with the Boeing P-8A Poseidon. Some P-3s still soldier on with specialized U.S. Navy units, making them among the most enduring platforms in aviation history. Though gone from frontline service, the aircraft leave behind a legacy of friendships. 

“The esprit de corps was infectious, with mission after mission filled with the excitement of doing something special,” says former VP-65 aviation ordnanceman Delbert Mitchell, a 17-year veteran of the squadron. Warburton agrees: “You’re counting on each other, and that builds friendships that last a lifetime.”

And it was a darn fun airplane to fly. 

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Robert Bernier is a former naval aviator and commercial pilot now working as an aircraft restoration volunteer at the San Diego Air & Space Museum.

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This article, originally titled “The Sub Hunter,” is from the Winter 2025 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

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