Alan Dron
By the time most exhibitors and guests arrived at the show yesterday, Northrop Grumman's Airborne Early Warning (AEW) team should already have achieved one of the main objectives of its visit to Farnborough.
Several groups from the UK's Royal Navy (RN), the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) and other interested parties spent several hours in the back of Northrop Grumman's AEW demonstration van late last week. The van, kitted out as an exact replica of the company's Hawkeye 2000 aircraft, is designed to give potential customers a feel for the E-2C Hawkeye 2000, which won orders for 22 examples last year for the US Navy and France. Deliveries are due to start in October 2001, with initial operational capability in 2002.As the UK parties were sitting at the van's displays, it was planned to have a live link with a Hawkeye 2000 flying overhead.
The Royal Navy's interest in a follow-on AEW system has been strengthened by the 1998 decision to procure two new aircraft carriers to replace the existing three Invincible-class ships.
At around 40,000 tons, the new vessels will be roughly twice the size of the current aircraft carriers. They would have an air wing of up to 50 aircraft, more than twice the typical mix of eight Sea Harrier FA2s, nine Sea King anti-submarine warfare and three Sea King AEW2A variants carried by the Invincibles. The AEW2As are being upgraded to AEW7 standard, whose service life may overlap the introduction into service of the new carriers.
However, Northrop Grumman says an E-2C is only one option available for the RN. "What we are looking at is using the Hawkeye architecture, built around the mission computer and displays, and putting them into any of the other alternatives, like the V-22 Osprey or a larger helicopter, such as the EH-101," says Gary O'Loughlin, director of international business development for Northrop Grumman Airborne Early Warning and Electronic Warfare Systems.
Interface
"We had the demonstration van at the last Farnborough, but it didn't have all its capabilities installed," says O'Loughlin. "We didn't have the datalink and some of the recording capabilities. We can now sit people down and interface with the system as though they were flying in the aircraft."
The Hawkeye providing the datalinking at Farnborough is from VAW-117 based at Point Mugu, California, the unit which is undertaking the test programme for the AEW mission computer upgrade and new displays.
Next year, says O'Loughlin, Northrop Grumman intends putting the Hawkeye 2000's radar into a Lockheed Martin C-130. It has already been installed on a Lockheed Martin P-3 Orion, giving Northrop Grumman experience of integrating the radar into two larger platforms, should a future customer wish to go down that road.
The C-130 to be used is the sole example of a US Coast Guard machine that was converted to an AEW configuration some years ago as the EC-130V and which has been sitting at Patuxent River, Maryland, for some time.
Source: Flight Daily News
