Northrop Grumman [NOC] believes its 35 years of experience, expertise and capability with fire control radars will help it prevail in the Air Force’s F-16 radar modernization competition.
Tim Winter, vice president of Northrop Grumman’s global sensor solutions business unit, told Defense Daily yesterday in a phone interview the company’s lengthy history with partner Lockheed Martin [LMT] of putting radars on F-16s gives it a leg up on Raytheon [RTN], its competitor on the F-16 radar modernization program.
“Our 35-year experience, legacy and history are big discriminators for us,” Winter said.
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The Air Force is looking to upgrade the legacy mechanically-scanned radars of its F-16s with modern Active Electronically-Scanned Array (AESA) radars. The service announced Friday in a pre-solicitation notice on Federal Business Opportunities that it expects to release a draft request for proposals (RFP) on, or around, Aug. 1. It also expects to hold an industry day on, or around, Aug. 22-23.
Northrop Grumman is offering its Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR) for the F-16 while Raytheon is offering its Raytheon Advanced Combat Radar (RACR), both fire-control AESA radars. A fire-control radar is designed to provide information to a fire-control system in order to calculate a targeting solution.
Winter said SABR is modular across the board and has the ability to have different size antennas for different platforms, which is an important aspect of the radar architecture, he added.
He also said SABR has been flown on an F-16 with the Air Force, making Northrop Grumman the first company to put an AESA radar on the F-16 itself, and has also been flown on two of the company’s own test aircraft. He added the F-16 AESA test flight took place in November 2009.
Winter said another Northrop Grumman advantage is capability as it is the only fifth generation fight aircraft radar provider, citing the F-22 and F-35, both developed by Lockheed Martin.
“With that capability, we’re bringing software, hardware and support, all from those fifth generation programs and that’s bringing a tremendous amount of leverage and benefit for this F-16 retrofit activity,” Winter said.
Winter said the SABR design has many common design parts and software with the F-35 program, but was really designed for the F-16 program.
“We have no Group A mods, meaning there is no hardware aircraft modifications to put the radar into the system and the software is very agile and able to be ported from other programs,” Winter said.
Winter said since Northrop Grumman has installed radars on 11 different F-16 variants, it has the technical capability to ensure SABR is a low-risk program.