Prototype Test Flights Evaluate Integrated Electronic Warfare Capabilities

The U.S. Navy and Raytheon successfully demonstrated an end to end, first of its kind, integrated electronic attack system during flight tests at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in October.

"Eight months after award of the NGJ program we successfully flew the integrated prototype system against representative threat radars," said Travis Slocumb, vice president of Electronic Warfare Systems at Raytheon's Space and Airborne Systems business.  "This demonstrates the capability and readiness of the core enabling technologies for the next generation of EW systems, and we did it on our first flight."

The advanced, first of its kind system consisted of an active electronically scanned array (AESA), an all-digital, open, scalable receiver and techniques generator and a self-powered pod mounted on the underside of a Gulfstream business jet.  The high power AESA front end and multichannel techniques generator are common building blocks not just for the U.S. Navy's Next Generation Jammer, but also for other airborne, maritime and ground-based EW systems.

A team of engineering and technical personnel collected and evaluated test data confirming the successful jamming and disruption of air defense radars, which were representative of enemy threat radars. The combination of jamming techniques, beam agility, array-transmit power and jammer management were very effective against the threat systems and all test objectives were met or exceeded.

A primary goal of the flight test activity, based at Naval Air Station Point Mugu, was to reduce risk in the engineering, manufacturing and development (EMD) phase of the Next Generation Jammer acquisition by the U.S. Navy. While all the elements had been previously tested in a lab setting, this was the first time the end-to-end system had been powered by the air stream.

(Image provided by Raytheon)

FMI: www.raytheon.com, www.navy.mil