"I'd say we're in production Links of London Charms," Ken Murphy, F-16 RACR senior business development manager at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, told Defense Daily yesterday. The RACR team spent about two years to develop and optimize the F-16 radar's unique power, cooling and space requirements, essentially taking the APG-79 radar found on F/A-18 Super Hornets and Growlers and scaling it Links of London Heart Charm to fit into the F-16, Murphy said. Raytheon's experience integrating radar systems on the retrofit side for F/A-18, F-15, and F-16 aircraft has much to do with its ability to deliver rapidly the RACR system, he said. "And, we have over 150,000 hours on the F/A-18 radar that's flown in combat off aircraft carriers. We've been able to harness 10 years of AESA technology that we've been developing." The biggest factor in terms of production speed would depend on customer requirements and how many of the modes Raytheon would Links of London Horseshoe Charm to bring over from the F-18 that it did not already have incorporated, he added. "We developed a radar mode suite that gives the F-16 what it has today, and have been waiting for an initial customer to come out and say, 'besides these air-to-air and air-to- ground modes, I would like to have X, Y, and Z,'" Murphy said. "No one has really come out and specified those requirements yet, and that would determine how quickly we could go to production." In talking with F-16 manufacturer Lockheed Martin [LMT] and some of the Links of London I Charm customers, Raytheon believes it could make it within the normal three-year window that Lockheed Martin would get from the time a contract is signed to delivery of a new or retrofitted airplane, Murphy said.
Commentaires
Il n'y a aucun commentaire sur cet article.