US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

Commander and Tweet.

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Equation said:

Interesting report in regards to Steam vs. Emal.

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MwRYum said:

Don't tell me now the USN EMAL programme's best hope is for PLAN to succeed in theirs?

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Equation said:

Maybe, but I think the US program EMAL has already been proven successful. Why else would they put it onto the USS Ford if it didn't?

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Extended Gray Eagle slated for 2018 Delivery

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems will deliver the extended range MQ-1C Gray Eagle to the US Army by 2018, the army’s medium altitude and endurance office product manager says this week.

The Gray Eagle Extended Range (GE-ER) exceeds the army’s 14h time on station requirement with a more than 40h endurance. Congress provided the GE-ER to the army with a $49 million addition to the fiscal year 2015 budget, which kicked off initial procurement. The effort was based on internal research and development by GA-ASI.

“Currently we’re on contract to buy 19,” Lt Col Cliff Sawyer told an audience at the annual AUVSI Xponential show in Dallas, Texas. “We’re in the process of finalizing the last production contract with some options.”

GA-ASI has built two GE-ERs, including one stationed at the army’s Redstone Arsenal where the service began electromagnetic testing on the UAV three weeks ago, Sawyer says. The programme will culminate with operational testing in 2018 with the army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) Company E, which provides the regiment’s precision aerial-surveillance capabilities.

Meanwhile, the army is still searching for smaller weapons that could augment the Gray Eagle’s Hellfire missile capability. Today, the platform is limited to carrying four of the 48kg (106lb) Lockheed Martin rail-launched Hellfires. With the current operations against ISIS, army aviators have more insurgents to kill and shouldn’t have to choose which engagements they can make, says Col Paul Cravey, army training doctrine and command (TRADOC) capability manager for unmanned aircraft systems.

“If you can fly your air vehicle for 20h and you only have two munitions on, you want to use all that endurance time in the air,” Cravey says. “We’re trying to give the commander more options to engage more targets kinetically downrange if he chooses to do so with that munition.”

The munition is not dependent on the upgraded Heavy Fuel Engine-180 (HFE-180) which comes on the extended-range MQ-1C, he adds.

“Those are mutually exclusive things,” Cravey says. "The engine types have nothing to do with one another, they’ll be able to carry it on either one, the weight is not a deciding factor.”

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Equation said:

Interesting report in regards to Steam vs. Emal.

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US Air Force networks F-15 and F-22 fighters – in flight!
Talon HATE pod squirts data over three protocols between previously-incompatible Aircraft
The United States Air Force has successfully networked its F-22 Raptor and F-15 Eagle aircraft under the “Talon HATE” program.

The F-15 first flew in 1972 and has been in service since the late 1970s, while the F-22 entered service two decades later. The latter aircraft had some data networking capabilities, but the F-15's vintage means it lacked that ability and some of the sensors that are standard kit on the F-22.

Both aircraft are still flying and it's assumed that will be the case for decades to come. But tactics have moved on and it's now assumed that military aircraft will be able to exchange data in real time to allow better battlefield management.

Hence the Talon HATE program, which adds new sensors to the F-15 plus the ability to send data from those devices, and the plane's other systems, to facilities on Earth's surface. The new kit resides in a pod carried beneath the craft. There's a picture of it

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on Flickr.

The Talon HATE pod was pressed into service during a “recent developmental flight test” that saw F-15s communicate over Link 16, Common Data Link and Wideband Global SATCOM satellites, and share data with F-22s flying at the same time. Signals bounced off satellites and also through ground facilities.

Link 16 is a NATO comms protocol that can achieve 31.6, 57.6, or 115.2 kilobits per seconds in flight. Common Data Link is a US protocol that can hit 274 Mbit/s. The wideband SATCOM is hoped to deliver total bandwidth of 2.4 Gbit/s.

Demonstrating that the venerable F-15 can chat to those three protocols is therefore a nice step towards keeping the aircraft relevant and capable of integration into modern airspace and battlefield management practices. Which is handy given

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and the F-22 program was truncated, leaving the F-15 making up the numbers.

Of course there's still ages to go before Talon HATE aboard F-15s is signed off and ready for duty when things get hot. For now we can enjoy the fact that forty-something-year-old aircraft can be retrofitted for this at all, and that clever folk have them chatting to younger craft to boot!

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has begun working on a new software load that will unlock new operational capabilities for the long-serving

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Eagle and F-15E Strike Eagle, as it fends off an F-15C/D retirement proposal by the U.S. Air Force.

The software load, known as Suite 9, is common with the C- and E-models and is funded under a $434.8 million upgrade contract recently awarded to Boeing.

The company disclosed work on the program in a May 11 statement. Boeing says this software load is the first to take advantage of the newly installed high-speed Advanced Display Core Processor II (ADCP-II) mission computer.

Boeing says Suite 9 switches on the

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Eagle Passive/Active Warning Survivability System (Epawss), which recently passed the government’s critical design review and will be rolled out fleet-wide in the early 2020s.

“Suite 9 is the first software release to add capability to the new ADCP-II computer,” Boeing says. “It’s the world’s fastest flight mission computer and capable of processing up to 87 billion instructions throughput per second.”

Suite 9 Program Manager Steve Henry says this software release is key to the F-15 maintaining its combat advantage over the coming decades. “The doors are opened to run new and advanced capabilities on the F-15’s proven platforms,” he says.

The Epawss threat detection system will help the non-stealthy F-15s survive against new types of surface-to-air missile systems being proliferated by Russia and China.

The Eagle presents a large radar cross-section to adversary air defense scanners, and the new electronic warfare suite will be able to counter those systems.

Other advancements enabled by the new processor is a long-range infrared search and track sensor and high-speed radar communications.

Delivery of these future capabilities to the F-15C Eagle fleet is contingent on those air superiority aircraft being kept around long enough for it to be economically prudent. The service has been discussing retiring the F-15 sometime in the next decade instead of the mid-2040s, per the current plan.

Boeing contends the F-15C will remain combat relevant into the late 2030s through structural and capability upgrades and should not be retired early because of a lack of capacity in the air-to-air combat role. The F-15E fighter-bomber will remain in service longer, but the Air Force has not said how the proposed F-15C retirement would affect that fleet.

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