24 February 2010: Aviation Week
By Douglas Barrie and Robert Wall
Developing active, electronically scanned radar—with electronic attack capabilities—is at the heart of a Royal Air Force drive to accelerate the air-to-surface role for the Typhoon aircraft, as the service mulls pulling the Tornado GR4 earlier than planned.
The Defense Ministry is aiming to fly an active, electronically scanned array (AESA) radar demonstrator on a Eurofighter Typhoon toward the end of 2013, the culmination of a four-year program which it recently contracted with radar manufacturer Selex Galileo.
The RAF is increasingly focused on fielding only two types of fighter aircraft as soon as it can without undercutting its basic capability. At present, it operates the Harrier, Tornado and Typhoon, with the F-35 due to be introduced in 2017.
Air Marshal Steve Dalton, the chief of the air staff, says he wants to neck down to the Typhoon and the Lockheed Martin F-35 as soon as “practicable.” This includes the provision of a “complex ground attack capability on the Typhoon.” Last week at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Dalton also raised the issue of the remaining fatigue life in the GR4 fleet, given the higher than expected operational utilization.
Present plans call for the Tornado to remain in service at least until 2025, though Dalton indicates this may be brought forward, pending ongoing studies. Reducing more quickly to a two-type fleet offers the attraction of significant support cost-savings, and this is likely to be closely scrutinized as part of a Strategic Defense Review (SDR), due to begin in mid-2010.
Stepping up the Typhoon’s air-to-surface capability would also provide the air force with a backstop should present problems with the F-35 threaten the U.K. in-service date with the type.
The Typhoon technology demonstrator program (TDP) will build on the Advanced Radar Targeting System (ARTS) TDP, for which an AESA demonstrator was flown on a Tornado aircraft. This radar was to have formed the core of the Reforger upgrade for the GR4A, but the program was canceled due to funding constraints.
While acknowledging the ARTS program, the Defense Ministry has been unwilling to discuss it in detail, particularly with regard to electronic attack.
The AESA TDP is a U.K.-only program, despite London’s attempt, along with its other three Typhoon partner countries—Germany, Italy and Spain— to align an AESA radar program for the aircraft. An industry executive from one of the partner states suggests the electronic-attack element of the U.K. work is a reason why the projects are being run in parallel.
The other three countries’ electronic-attack aspirations center on the use of a dedicated platform, which they say can defeat radars over a far higher frequency range than a Typhoon AESA radar.
The Typhoon TDP will employ the swash-plate approach used on the ARTS program to allow the antenna to be repositioned and to counter performance degradation at high off-bore-sight angles. The industry executive says the bandwidths to be used for the TDP radar will be broader as a result of the electronic-attack requirement. The swash-plate approach has already been selected by Saab, which is using the Selex Galileo ES-05 Raven AESA for the Gripen NG.
The Defense Ministry has taken the first steps in a quicker move toward a two-type fleet. As part of a package of cuts and reallocation in Planning Round 10, it was announced at the end of 2009 that a squadron of Harriers is to be axed, with another one or two squadrons of Harriers and/or Tornados to be cut as part of the SDR.
British Defense Secretary Bob Ainsworth told Parliament in December: “In line with our current aspirations to reduce to two fast-jet types—the Typhoon and Joint Strike Fighter—we will pursue without delay the future capability program Phase 2. This is fundamental to the development of its multirole capability and integration with the latest weapons.”
Selex Galileo in Edinburgh is the focus of the U.K.’s industry expertise in AESA technology, on which it has been working since the 1990s with both company funds and Defense Ministry support.
Bob Mason, Selex Galileo’s senior vice president for sales and marketing for radar, says the U.K. contract was signed “a couple of weeks ago.” The TDP work will cover both air-to-air and air-to-ground modes. Work on the latter will explore high-resolution synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target-indicator modes. Mason says he cannot discuss the question of electronic attack.
The Typhoon partner nations are continuing to try to agree on a road map to integrate an AESA radar on the aircraft, and they now have an industry offer in hand. Mason says that while there is “no dependency” between the U.K. TDP and a four-nation program, elements of the U.K. work could be fed into the partners’ project.
