In a Tel Aviv conference room, Shlomo Livne reaches into a paper shopping bag wearing the logo of a local chocolate shop and pulls out, alas, not sweets but a black electronic box.
Outwardly, the box looks like it could be one of any number of electromagnetic spectrum-battling line replacement units (LRUs) produced by Elisra, the $400 million electronic warfare house of private Israeli aerospace and electronics contractor Elbit Systems. Livne is the vice president and general manager of Elisra’s airborne division.
But “this one is very, very unique,” says Livne, explaining he pulled this box off a nearby production line that morning to include it in his presentation.
The capabilities built into this box represent a broad shift in Elbit’s product strategy, from highly specialised, standalone LRUs that perform a specific function to single units integrating multiple functions while consolidating and processing the data to make an intuitive interface for the operator.
The transition goes beyond Livne’s field of electronic warfare. It is also evident in Elbit’s latest moves in the airborne reconnaissance market. Elbit not only develops a new generation of enhanced sensors spanning multiple bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also a software-based processing core that processes and analyses all the data, supplying information to operators in a simple, intuitive format.
Elbit is not alone in the aerospace industry in pursuing such technology, but in several areas it believes it has stolen a lead on bigger rivals in Europe and the USA. The company’s background has served this purpose well. The demise of the Lavi fighter project in the mid-1980s forced Israeli companies to refocus on electronics and unmanned air vehicles. As a result, Elbit developed an unusually broad portfolio of products and capabilities in several areas of the military avionics business. The goal now is to repackage all of those standalone boxes into an integrated system.
The opportunity on the export market is vast. A particular target for Elisra is the US defence market. The US Army has expressed interest in simplifying the increasing complexity of the aircraft survivability equipment loaded onto thousands of helicopters.
“I believe – that’s my vision – but I believe that this unit, this [electronic warfare] suite more or less in the next five or six years, will be part of the competition in the United States also,” Livne says.
The company is already gaining momentum on exports, having proven the technology in the Israeli air force fleet. As both a highly sophisticated and relatively small branch, the Israeli air arm offers an ideal laboratory for introducing innovative changes.
“It’s very difficult for USAF [US Air Force] to change this standard because they are talking about 3,000 platforms,” says Livne.
Technically, the name of the unit Livne pulled out of the shopping bag is the SPS-65 V5.5, but Elbit’s characteristically savvy marketers give it the catchier brand name “All-in-Small”. Electronic warfare has grown steadily more complicated over the last two decades. It was once enough for a military helicopter or fixed wing transport to carry little more than a radar warning receiver.
As electromagnetic threats intensify, so has the aircraft onboard suite of survivability equipment. In addition to the radar warning receiver, the typical military aircraft also now carries multiple sensors such as ultraviolet or infrared-based missile warning systems, signal receivers, communications jammers, laser countermeasures and chaff and flare dispensers. Each sensor is connected by a wiring harness to a processor, not unlike the All-in-Small SPS-65 V5.5.
The difference is, the All-in-Small acts as a central processor. Each of the sensors and countermeasure units are able to connect to a single unit rather than multiple boxes. By connecting all of the sensors and countermeasures in the same system, Elisra’s All-In-Small consolidates the processing.
“We saw what are the trends in the market and asked what do we have to do to satisfy the market and the customer itself?” Livne says. “So we decided to develop it ourself.”
Elisra makes all of the components of an aircraft survivability suite with one exception: the chaff and flares dispenser. But Elisra has developed interfaces to connect seven different dispensers made by other companies to the All-In-Small box. The combined system, using an Elisra-made suite, is already installed for unidentified customers on helicopters and fixed-wing transports. It has also been selected as the survivability system for the Embraer KC-390 tanker-transport.
To realize Livne’s goal of market share in the USA, the system must also be adaptable. Connecting the All-in-Small unit to Elisra-made systems seems simpler than integrating with sensors and countermeasures made by other companies, such as Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems.
But Livne insists such integration is possible and relatively simple. The All-In-Small is designed to be modular and to use an open architecture. It is not necessary to connect all the survivability systems on board the aircraft to the All-In-Small box. Elisra’s software is designed to “learn” the coding of another company’s system, rather than adapt the system on board the aircraft to it, Livne says.
“If you are going to add boxes it’s an issue. If your’e going to reduce boxes it’s much, much easier,” he says. “Why? Because in each aircraft there is the previous EW system. So I can put it in one box. Usually it’s much smaller than the existing one. So I can put an adaptor, a very small adaptor, for this [application], and this adaptor for that one.”
Airborne reconnaissance has undergone a similar transformation as that seen in electronic warfare. It was once enough to concentrate sensors on detecting the movements and signals of battalion-sized units. The focus is now on tracking individual militants moving through dense crowds of civilians.
“It’s not necessary only to look at target. But you need to have a very precise geographic location of the target. Because you want to cross different sensors on a single target,” says Neri Zin, vice-president of electro-optical systems for Elbit. “But it has to be very precise. If this person is holding a cell phone and you want to intercept it with a [signals intelligence] system, the other guy standing 5m away from him also is holding a cell phone. And you want to cross it to understand the full picture in both the electro-optical and the SIGINT, then you need a very precise signature on this guy.”
As a result, Elbit has been developing products to help military operators integrate multiple sensors from multiple platforms onto a common geospatial grid.
“You need to take all information from different platforms and different sensors,” Zin says. “And you need to put it on a single GIS grid. You need to do it fast. You need to do it seamlessly. The operator does not have a lot of time to understand. The interface needs to be something that is obvious – a full picture, on time and very precise.”
Source: FlightGlobal.com
