13 June 2007

US Air Force to expand Boeing F-15C active radar upgrade with Raytheon-05/06/2007-Washington DC-Flight International

My guess would be that the US is expecting to see more cruise missile threats, and this upgrade is about dealing with this.

Then again, it may be that the F-22 is too damn expensive to buy enough to use in a meaningful defense of the US, and the JSF is behind schedule.

US Air Force to expand Boeing F-15C active radar upgrade with Raytheon

By Stephen Trimble

Raytheon is reviving a programme to upgrade the US Air Force's Boeing F-15C fighters with active electronically scanned array radars, expanding on an initial phase performed on a single squadron of 18 Alaska-based aircraft in the late 1990s.

The emergency supplemental funding bill for fiscal year 2007, signed by President George Bush in late May, contains about $62 million to upgrade a small number of active duty F-15Cs with an enhancement of the 'brick' array APG-63(V)2 radar previously integrated to now use a tile design, says Mike Henchey, Raytheon business development director. Raytheon has previously designated this as the APG-63(V)3, but it is likely to enter service under a new designation in the APG-series, he says. The (V)3 variant refers to the active array of transmitter/receiver modules, with this front-end to be mated with the APG-63(V)1 radar processor already installed on most of the USAF's active duty F-15Cs."

...

0 comments :

Post a Comment