Airborne maritime surveillance missions are time consuming, resource intensive activities, that must be carefully planned if poor utilization of highly expensive assets is to be avoided. This thesis develops a decision aid to provide aircraft tasking authorities with accurate estimates of target detection probabilities for different size search areas, using the surface traffic characteristics and predicted sensor performance for the area of operations. The decision aid uses simulation to evaluate estimates of surveillance effectiveness to a level of accuracy and sophistication not previously available. Surveillance estimates are calculated using mission-specific aircraft, sensor, and scenario information. The model can be utilized for a wide variety of aircraft/sensor combinations and blue water mission scenarios. Surveillance estimates are presented graphically for each evaluated search area size. This facilitates the selection of the correct size to achieve a desired level of surveillance effectiveness or provides a measure of the aircraft's surveillance effectiveness for a given size search area.
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