Alan Dron
One of the most challenging problems facing the Embraer team developing the EMB-145 Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) aircraft is trying to determine the true size of the potential market available to it.
This, says Anastcio Katsanos, Embraer's defence market strategy senior manager, is because so many countries until recently did not believe they could afford such a system.
"Until we showed up with our system, the market was restricted to US companies," he said at Asian Aerospace yesterday. "All countries who had a serious AEW&C requirement had that requirement because they had the budgets to cope with such large systems."
The appearance of Embraer's offering has made an AEW&C capability much more affordable, bringing it within the range of more nations. However, those nations are now having to try to juggle their budgets to accommodate that capability.
"We are seeing this movement worldwide. AEW&C is moving up the priority list, but it will take some time for what was a dormant requirement to climb to the top of nations' priorities," says Katsanos. Embraer believes 15-20 countries could ultimately move into the market.
The first of five EMB-145 AEW & Cs for the Brazilian air force (to be designated EMB-145SA in service) is now in flight test, as is the first of three EMB-145RS (Remote Sensing) variants.
The SA will be used for aerial surveillance of the vast Amazon basin while the RS will handle environmental protection and ground surveillance duties in the same region.
Commercial
Flight test results to date have exceeded predictions, says Romualdo Monteiro de Barros, executive vice-president, commercial defence market.
Both general flight performance and fuel consumption are better than anticipated, says Barros, but he declines to go into details, due to what he describes as classified aspects of the Brazilian air force's mission profiles.
Testing of the AEW&C version is at present focusing on the testing of the basic aircraft, with testing of Ericsson's ERIEYE radar, mounted above the fuselage, still to come. With the Amazon basin area to cover, the AEW&C has an endurance of up to 9h and carries 3t more fuel than the civil version of the aircraft to achieve this, with an extra fuel tank in the rear fuselage.
To cope with this higher weight, a higher-thrust version of the Allison AE3007 engine used on the civil versions is employed.
Greece has ordered four AEW&C versions of the aircraft: "Whereas in Brazil the aircraft will be used mainly to control illegal air traffic, in Greece it's a typical military AEW mission, so the integration approach is slightly different."
While the Brazilian versions have a communications intelligence system supplied by Raytheon, the Greek versions will have electronic support measures, radio and datalinks and a self-protection suite supplied by Thomson Detexis.
The Greek contract is "extremely important to us", says Barros, as the aircraft will be operating as part of Nato, controlling Nato fighters.
If that capability can be successfully demonstrated, it will do the aircraft's sales prospects no harm at all.
Source: Flight Daily News
