The Raytheon [RTN] Advanced Combat Radar (RACR), the latest Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar, successfully completed flight tests aboard an Air Force F-16 aircraft and is now available as an option for domestic and international customers, the company recently said.
“I’d say we’re in production today,” Ken Murphy, F-16 RACR senior business development manager at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, told Defense Daily yesterday.
The RACR team spent about two years to develop and optimize the F-16 radar’s unique power, cooling and space requirements, essentially taking the APG-79 radar found on F/A-18 Super Hornets and Growlers and scaling it down to fit into the F-16, Murphy said.
Raytheon’s experience integrating radar systems on the retrofit side for F/A-18, F-15, and F-16 aircraft has much to do with its ability to deliver rapidly the RACR system, he said. “And, we have over 150,000 hours on the F/A-18 radar that’s flown in combat off aircraft carriers. We’ve been able to harness 10 years of AESA technology that we’ve been developing.”
The biggest factor in terms of production speed would depend on customer requirements and how many of the modes Raytheon would have to bring over from the F-18 that it did not already have incorporated, he added.
“We developed a radar mode suite that gives the F-16 what it has today, and have been waiting for an initial customer to come out and say, ‘besides these air-to-air and air-to- ground modes, I would like to have X, Y, and Z,'” Murphy said. “No one has really come out and specified those requirements yet, and that would determine how quickly we could go to production.”
In talking with F-16 manufacturer Lockheed Martin [LMT] and some of the international customers, Raytheon believes it could make it within the normal three- year window that Lockheed Martin would get from the time a contract is signed to delivery of a new or retrofitted airplane, Murphy said.
According to Jim Hvizd, vice president, international business development, Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, AESA radar technology has become a ‘must have’ for customers around the world who need to keep their aircraft relevant in the swiftly evolving battlespace.
The radar demonstration flights were conducted in partnership with the Air Force and Lockheed Martin, where the team highlighted the multirole capabilities RACR could bring to the F-16, while demonstrating seamless integration into the airplane, Murphy said.
“On the air-to-air side, we demonstrated both the standard track and target capability on the long range AESA, and we also [did] multiple air combat modes,” Murphy said. “On the air-to-ground side, we’ve done four high-res SAR modes, and also did GMTI [ground movement target indicator] and overlayed that on a SAR map.”
Murphy said that the reliability and maintainability difference is a quantum leap ahead when replacing a moving front array with AESA’s fixed array, one that eliminates a huge part of maintenance problems. “From a reliability side, when you have greater than 1,000 flying hours mean time between failure, that really helps the customer.”
In addition to RACR’s enhanced air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities, it greatly increases situational awareness, he added. “We’re able to simultaneously track numerous targets, where in mechanically scanned array it’s very difficult to track one, two, or three targets. RACR gives F-16s a true 24-hour, day and night, all-weather capability that they really didn’t have prior…and [it] can support any type of air-to-air or air-to-ground weapon in the F-16 inventory.”
In terms of modernization, Murphy said that on the retrofit side, the biggest issue is wing life of an airplane. He said that even considering that many of the potential F-16 customers are already signed up for Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), there are still about 1,000 airplanes worldwide that could provide the base market for RACR upgrades. The cost of the RACR is about the same as the previous radar, but total ownership costs are much less, he added.
He said that the Air Force is considering a long term concept for the F-16, akin to what the service has done maintaining a fleet of F-15 Golden Eagles. Raytheon has provided the government with price and availability figures for two potential foreign customers, Murphy said. “We know there is a lot of interest out there, the biggest thing is who will go first. A lot of the international customers were waiting on the U.S. Air Force, but it’s obvious that with the current position on JSF, the U.S. Air Force may go forward or may not, and we’re seeing that some countries may go before the U.S. Air Force on this.”