Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and a newly announced team of Leidos [LDOS] and L3Harris Technologies
[LHX] have detailed their proposals for the Army’s ATHENA-S intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) jet program, with an award expected by the end of this fiscal year.
Both are outfitting Bombardier Global 6500 jets with radars and signals intelligence systems for ATHENA-S, which is intended to serve as a bridge capability to ultimately inform final requirements for the Army’s future HADES, or High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, program of record.
Leidos and L3Harris said on Tuesday they teamed up on a bid for ATHENA-S, citing their “experience designing, integrating, certifying and operating ISR business jets for the U.S. Army.”
“With our combined integration, investment, engineering and design expertise, we look forward to producing a highly-configurable platform with more ISR capabilities to create an operational picture of the battlefield. The Leidos-L3Harris team is excited to deliver a decision advantage for the U.S. and our allies,” Tim Freeman, Leidos’ senior vice president and airborne solutions operations manager, said in a statement.
Both companies are currently involved in separate Army fixed-wing ISR programs, with Leidos outfitting a Bombardier Challenger 650 for the ARTEMIS effort and L3Harris working on the Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System, or ARES, program in support of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command,
Leidos and L3Harris said ATHENA-S is intended to “close the gap between the Army’s medium and high-altitude ISR aircraft fleet” and will eventually support missions “in the U.S. European Command area of responsibility.”
Tim Owings, executive vice president for SNC’s mission solutions and technologies business area, told Defense Daily in a recent interview an award for ATHENA-S is expected before the end of FY ‘23, likely in September.
SNC currently has two Global 6500 jets going through modifications and integration at its Hagerstown, Maryland facility, with Owings noting the work done to date would allow for an accelerated delivery schedule with the Army.
“We’re hoping and planning on winning that in September. And as the RFP has laid out, it calls for delivery within 12 months. I’m confident we will beat that by a lot just because of how far on that with our engineering, our kitting and everything else we’ve got ready to go,” Owings said.
Last year, SNC detailed its RAPCON-X ISR jet capability to Defense Daily, citing an emphasis on open architecture and model-based systems engineering for rapid mission reconfiguration and designed to operate within the future JADC2 framework (Defense Daily, April 13 2022).
SNC also pursued the Army’s separate ATHENA-R program, which focused on integrating Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] Long Range Radar, but lost out on that effort earlier this year to a team of MAG Aerospace and L3Harris.
Owings said the RAPCON-X proposed for ATHENA-S would require “minimal changes” to meet the likely requirements for the future HADES program.
“We’ll use much of that design [from ATHENA-S], there will be some slight changes depending on the different equipment as required by the Army, but the exterior mold line, the interior mold line and the digital backbone will all be the same. The airplane was designed to be ‘future-proofed,’ in that it won’t take a lot of rework to modify what’s going to be flown on the airplane,” Owings told Defense Daily.
SNC in April also announced a version of RAPCON-X on a Bombardier Challenger 650 had been selected for the next phase of the Finnish Border Guard’s “MVX” program to find a replacement for its Dornier 228 surveillance aircraft, with Finland expected to select a winner by the end of the year.
“This is a critical time in history for Finland and the NATO Alliance as Europe stands strong in the face of significant security challenges. RAPCON-X provides interoperability across a wide spectrum of Finland’s national security infrastructure as well as NATO, and will set the Finnish Border Guard up for mission success now and in the future,” Owings said in a statement at the time.