Plan to connect F/A-18E/F to weapons network raises questions on fighter's future and throws up funding issues
The US Navy has started taking small steps to boost the connectivity power of the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, but plugging the fighter into an emerging high-speed network of weapon decisions is forcing difficult funding choices.
At stake is the Super Hornet's continued relevance on a US military battlefield that in 2020 will be dominated by weapons systems equipped with software defined radios exchanging critical intelligence and target data on a wideband networking waveform. Lacking such a capability, the role of the F/A-18E/F could be marginalised compared with the capabilities of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and new unmanned strike vehicles.
The USN's programme office is acting to fill in this gap, and provide the capability before the JSF arrives on carrier decks after 2013. The Super Hornet team has outlined its proposal in a seven-increment networking upgrade roadmap, which is expected to cost in the hundreds of millions – but not billions – of dollars to complete on the 460-aircraft fleet.
The roadmap's first two increments – relatively minor hardware and software changes – have been funded and are to be fielded within 18 months, says Super Hornet programme manager B D Gaddis.
In increment one, the navy has paid Boeing $13 million to install TEAC solid-state recorders on 210 Super Hornets. The devices allow the two-seat F-models to take a screenshot of target imagery collected by an onboard sensor and downlink it to a ground unit, which can make annotations to the image and beam it back to the cockpit. In increment two, the Super Hornet will be upgraded to send imagery to a combined air operations centre (CAOC). The CAOC compares the fighter's image with a previous image taken of the same location. A software algorithm uses the comparison to measure the target co-ordinates and send the image to the fighter with improved co-ordinates. A further upgrade planned in the first two increments is to dramatically reduce an inherent targeting error problem affecting all fighters using Link 16 and ARC-210 radios.
Both radios use message formats that identify target locations using a two-dimensional, latitude-longitude structure, but that is inadequate for precision-guided bombs that use the four-dimensional co-ordinates of GPS-aided targeting. Gaddis says that problem can be fixed with a software update.
STEPHEN TRIMBLE/WASHINGTON DC
Source: Flight International
