pack

P&O Cruises urges all passengers with trips booked to bring proof or risk being ‘denied boarding’ at their own expense

P&O Cruises says all passengers must bring a particular item with them or risk being ‘denied boarding’. The popular cruise operator states that packing the item is compulsory for all guests who wish to sail on the ship, or their holiday could be ruined if they fail to do so.

P&O Cruises is among the largest and most popular cruise operators in the UK, and as the peak travel season approaches, many people will have trips booked. The vessels are designed specifically for the British market and depart year-round directly from Southampton.

P&O Cruises operates a fleet of seven ships, divided into family-friendly vessels such as Arvia, Iona, Britannia, Azura and Ventura, and adult-only ships such as Arcadia and Aurora, reports the Liverpool Echo. Irrespective of which vessel people embark upon, all guests must bring a crucial item with them. Should customers fail to present the item, P&O Cruises warns: “Unfortunately, you will be denied boarding”.

On the P&O Cruises website, the cruise operator clarifies what passengers need to pack and explains the rationale. A statement reads: “We’re delighted that you’ve chosen to set sail with us, and we cannot wait to welcome you on board. Before we get there, it is mandatory for all guests to have suitable cruise travel insurance cover in order to sail with us.”

It adds: “It is your responsibility to ensure you have appropriate cover in place for the duration of your holiday. Unfortunately, you will be denied boarding, at your own expense, if you’re unable to confirm you have arranged insurance.

“You may be asked for proof of your cruise travel insurance. So, please be sure to bring either a printed or digital copy of your insurance documentation that confirms cover for the named travellers over the dates of travel.”

Outlining the main reason why travel insurance is crucial to arrange before setting sail, P&O Cruises stated: “For many significant purchases in your life, insurance is essential. And holidays are no different.

“Travel insurance ensures you can relax and enjoy your holiday with peace of mind that you’re covered in the event something should go wrong. This includes unforeseen incidents before your holiday, while travelling or while you’re away.”

P&O Cruises provides a checklist for selecting the appropriate level of cruise insurance protection. It includes:

• Ensure your insurance covers a cruise holiday
• Covers the full length of the trip
• Includes all destinations – choose worldwide cover if unsure
• Includes medical and repatriation cover of £2 million minimum
• You’ll need to declare any pre-existing medical conditions
• We would also recommend that you have adequate cancellation cover to cover the cost of your trip

I’ve got travel insurance already. Do I need cruise insurance?

P&O Cruises states: “You will need to look into the level of cover your travel insurance provides. Some bank accounts include travel insurance but the policies often offer limited amounts of cover.

“Standard travel insurance is generally meant for a land-based holiday and as such, won’t cover many of the elements of a cruise holiday. A cruise holiday requires more specialist cover, for example if there was a need to be medically evacuated at sea. The most important thing is to make sure you’ve told your insurer you are going on a cruise holiday.”

What happens if I don’t declare pre-existing medical conditions?

P&O Cruises warns: “You run the risk of not being fully covered and having to pay for medical treatment which can be extremely costly. Emergency medical treatment can even be refused if you do not have the correct insurance, this includes failing to declare pre-existing conditions.”

If I cancel my holiday, will I get my money back?

P&O Cruises states: “If you cancel your holiday, the cancellation policy in our Booking Conditions applies. If you are cancelling due to a medical reason and you have declared the medical condition, your insurer should refund any monies paid less the relevant policy excess.”

L3Harris is pushing its modular Wolf Pack family of “launched effects vehicles” for the U.S. Army, including to equip its H-60 Black Hawk series and AH-64 Apache helicopters, with an eye on the specific demands of a future conflict in the Pacific. The family of vehicles includes the Red Wolf, configured for long-range precision strikes against targets on land or at sea, and the Green Wolf fitted with an electronic warfare payload. Overall, these are part of a wider drive toward fielding modular, relatively cheap, and small systems that increasingly blur the line between uncrewed aerial systems, especially longer-range kamikaze drones, and cruise missiles, as well as decoys.

Readers can refer to our previous coverage of the Wolf Pack family, and it is also worth noting that the company is under contract with the U.S. Marine Corps to deliver the related PASM, the Precision Attack Strike Munition.

At the Army Aviation Association of America’s Army Aviation Warfighting Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, this week, TWZ caught up with Brad Reeves, the director of strategy and requirements for the Agile Development Group at L3Harris, to talk about the company’s vision for the Wolf family with the Army.

TWZ: What is the primary driver behind the Wolf family, and how is it relevant to the Army’s rotary-wing fleets?

Brad Reeves: The Department of War has a heavy emphasis on the Pacific and a conflict over there. Mass is an issue. We have a lot of exquisite weapons today, but the numbers are not maybe as high as we might hope for a conflict over there. So, they’re trying to solve that problem. Affordable mass has kind of become the buzzword, which basically means, “hey, how do we get capability that we can buy in quantity without breaking the bank?” And so, with that, the Department of War, actually Secretary Hegseth, issued a memo on April 30 of last year. And one of the things he called out specifically was launched effects, the urgency to get that fielded beginning this year. So, that’s a high-emphasis item for those guys.

Launched effects are really meant to be an affordable mass solution for the Army. But the real story behind this is what we call our Wolf Pack family of systems, and our offering and the capability it brings. And the story here is it’s very capable, but it’s what it does for the Army and for Army aviation. So it’s transforming Army aviation, and it’s addressing platforms that lack some relevancy today in the fight. Black Hawks, Apaches, etc, have a very short-range capability, relatively speaking, when you’re talking about the Pacific, and you have the tyranny of distance and anti-access/area-denial threats. It’s a much harder challenge than what we’ve dealt with in the decades since those aircraft were first invented.

Now we’re basically bringing relevancy to those platforms. We’re transforming from a weapons-effectiveness range and lethality range of single-digit kilometers, maybe up to a dozen kilometers, and we’re now extending that to hundreds of kilometers. We’re taking what before was a single-mission aircraft that’s supporting the Army; it’s doing close combat attack missions for Army soldiers on the ground, and is basically specific to that single service. And we’re now expanding that, and we’re giving that platform a joint or coalition viability in a Pacific flight. And so, the relevance now has increased. We’re taking what was before, a single-domain, fully land-based capability. We’re turning it into multi-domain, so now surface, meaning maritime, and land. And then we’re taking the target sets, which were traditionally tanks, maybe threats that we get from ground forces, etc. Again, we’re expanding that so it can be maritime threats and ground threats. It’s kind of a revolution in the way that the Army is going to fight and what they’re going to contribute to the joint coalition force. The Army desperately needs this capability.

TWZ: And what are the differences between the Wolf Pack family members?

Brad Reeves: Our launched effects offering, we call it the Wolf Pack family of systems. Today, we have two high-level mission capability variants. We have the Red Wolf, which is the kinetic variant, so a cruise missile. We have the Green Wolf, which has a purely (non-kinetic) electronic warfare payload. So now you’re also doing suppression of enemy air defenses. These types of missions, the DILR mission — detect, ID, locate, report — and/or electronic attack to suppress this threat.

Wolf Pack is designed to have multiple variants, so one aircraft, let’s say an Apache in this instance, you could launch multiple variants, Green and Red. You have a Green Wolf that goes out ahead and is searching and building the EMBM, the electromagnetic battle management. Through some software we call DISCO, which is AI-driven software, it’s building the landscape where the threats are, whether on the surface or on the land.

TWZ: How does PASM, the Precision Attack Strike Munition, differ from these?

Brad Reeves: It comes out of our Wolf Pack family. It’s a unique variant designed for the U.S. Marine Corps AH-1Z Viper, and we’re delivering early operational capability. They did a long-range precision fire, LRPF, last September, and that was somewhat of a graduation event. Now we’re basically starting to work with production at our plant in Virginia.

TWZ: So these are basically loitering munitions?

Brad Reeves: We don’t consider it a loitering munition, but technically, by definition, yes, what it’s doing is it’s flying a pattern. It’s very smart: it goes out, starts detecting threats, then it will set up a pattern to make sure that a) it’s survivable itself, so it doesn’t fly over a threat and get shot down. But b), it will maximize the search pattern, and then it will deconflict with the others in the pack, so that you can, if you have a large area, you can have one, one will say, “hey, I’m going to go do maybe a zigzag pattern over here looking for threats. You go do a zigzag pattern and then report those back.” Once they find the threats, they’ve got options. Either the aircraft can just avoid the threats because they know where they are, or if they need to go through them, then you can either use electronic attack to jam them, or you can send a signal to one of the kinetic variants. Then the kinetic variant does the destruction of enemy air defenses mission.

That’s kind of why we call it the Wolf Pack: working together collaboratively in a pack to perform a mission that’s assigned by the pilot, and they do that autonomously. They have been ground-launched. They have been air-launched from both manned and unmanned platforms, and they can be launched from rotary-wing or fixed-wing. Since we’re here with the Army, the target is Black Hawks and Apaches very specifically.

TWZ: Would you say that the Wolf Pack is oriented generally towards the SEAD/DEAD mission?

Brad Reeves: It is much broader. But certainly one of the main applications is SEAD/DEAD. With the EW variant, that’s really applicable when you’re doing SEAD/DEAD, or you’re just looking for platform survivability, meaning you’re going towards a mission, but you want to maybe send something out ahead. These fly at high subsonic speeds. They’re going out ahead when launched from a helicopter. They’re scouting out the area, giving them the picture, and allowing them to either avoid, suppress, or defeat threats that may be in their way.

TWZ: Presumably, the cost point of these means the numbers can be fairly scalable, depending on the requirement?

Brad Reeves: Absolutely, it depends on the mission set. One of the advantages is that, while it is an affordable mass munition, it also comes with significant capability. There are some, what I would call differentiators, that put this capability at the high end of the affordable mass, meaning it’s very inexpensive compared to traditional legacy weapons that the forces are using today. We usually say it’s about five times cheaper than what these aircraft would be using today. There are BAAs, broad area announcements, something the U.S. government will release to industry, asking for different capabilities. Right now, when they’re asking for this type of capability, they’re usually targeting somewhere between $300,000 to $500,000 for that market, per round, and we’re certainly in that sweet spot.

TWZ: Aside from the small turbine engine that they share, how modular are the Wolf Pack vehicles themselves?

Brad Reeves: Some people call it a truck, but for some reason, that offends me. But you’ve got the platform, and we’ve designed it modularly with what’s called WOSA, weapon open systems architecture. And so you can interchange the payload. You can take the platform, you can put a warhead in it, and it becomes kinetic. You can take the warhead out, you can put an EW payload in it. I’m oversimplifying a little bit because with the kinetic variant, there are sensors and other stuff. So you probably wouldn’t physically take a kinetic one and swap out the warhead for an EW payload.

TWZ: When it comes to Green Wolf, which has no warhead, is this designed to be expendable or recoverable?

Brad Reeves: We have both. We have a recoverable variant. It depends on what the customer wants. In some instances, they want recoverability. And with recoverability, you lose a little bit of range. So in some instances, it’s going to be on a one-way mission; they just want maximum range. Basically, the parachute equipment we use to recover it takes up a little bit of space that otherwise would be fuel tank space.

TWZ: How do these vehicles navigate?

Brad Reeves: It has the standard inertial navigation and GPS. It has those capabilities inside of it, and then the seeker effectively is used purely for in-game targeting.

TWZ: To what degree would you be able to surge production to meet urgent demands?

Brad Reeves: We gave our manufacturing team the problem and said, “Hey, multiple customers are asking for as many as a thousand per year. We expect this to really blow up. How do we know how big a plant to build? How do we know what we can do?” And so they actually designed a modular, scalable production plan. In theory, you can scale up to as many as you want. But right now, what we’re doing is we’re scaling towards a thousand a year, which is the current path, and then if the demand signal spikes, we have the ability to scale above that.

The beauty of this vehicle is that there’s a lot as a significant amount of commonality, which does allow us to scale, and also gives us economies of scale, price, etc.

Meet the “Wolf Pack”

TWZ: Where are you now with testing?

Brad Reeves: We’ve flown over 50 times in test events with the military. So we’ve done multiple services. We’ve done formal testing with those services. It’s been launched twice off the AH-1Z. We’ve launched off fixed-wing UAS, but this gets a little sensitive with the customers, as to what those platforms are. And we’ve done ground launch.

TWZ: Do you have a pathway toward testing on the Black Hawk and Apache?

Brad Reeves: I am very passionate about making sure this gets fielded to U.S. Army soldiers, specifically the Apache and the Black Hawk. Right now, we’ve obviously got Epic Fury. But if something lights off in the Pacific, this just pales in comparison. If I were young enough to be flying in that fight, I would want more capability. And so I am a little bit of a zealot. The U.S. Army, I know, has to have this capability, and I believe they want it. It’s going to be a game-changer for them, and it’s going to be important to the joint force and coalition forces. It is a significant transformational capability.

Jamie Hunter contributed to this story.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com