30 mars 2022 | International, Aérospatial
Canada picks the F-35 in fighter replacement competition
Canada plans to buy 88 new fighter jets to replace its CF-18s.
9 avril 2018 | International, Aérospatial
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — The Block III Super Hornet is getting a marginal increase in stealth capability, but if you're expecting the invisible aircraft of President Donald Trump's dreams, think again.
Building a “stealthy” Super Hornet has been one of Trump's talking points since he was elected to the presidency. During a March trip to Boeing's plant in St. Louis, he claimed the U.S. military would buy Super Hornets with “the latest and the greatest stealth and a lot of things on that plane that people don't even know about.”
Trump was referring to one of the Super Hornet's Block III upgrades slated to be incorporated on jets rolling off the production line in 2020: the application of radar absorbent materials or RAM, also known as stealth coating.
But far from being “the latest and greatest,” the company has already used the exact same materials on the on the Block II Super Hornet to help decrease the chances of radar detection, said Dan Gillian, who manages Boeing's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and E/A-18G Growler programs.
Block III jets will get “a little more” of that coating applied to them, “and in a few different areas to buy a little bit more performance,” Gillian told Defense News in a March interview.
All in all, those improvements will reduce the aircraft's radar cross section by about 10 percent, and with very low risk, he said.
Although the general public tends to think of stealth like the invisibility cloak from Harry Potter or Wonder Woman's invisible plane, stealth is more of a continuum that is enabled and affected by many factors, experts told Defense News.
“It's not a Romulan cloaking device,” said Richard Aboulafia, a Teal Group aviation analyst, referencing a technology from Star Trek that allowed spaceships to be invisible to the naked eye and electro-optical sensors.
“It's about reducing the likelihood that an adversary will see you first. And seconds count, so if it buys a little extra time, then it helps.”
The most important contributors to low observability are the aircraft's shape and the use of LO coatings, with airframe shape commonly seen as twice as important as the coatings, he said.
Stealth fighters from the oddly angled F-117 to the F-22 and F-35, with their rounded edges, were all designed to bounce radar waves away from an aircraft, sometimes at the expense of aerodynamic performance or other attributes, said Brian Laslie, an Air Force historian and author.
That being said, the Super Hornet, with it's external stores and pylons, is not going to replicate the low observability of the joint strike fighter, which was designed from the beginning with stealth in mind.
“But just because it's not a pure LO aircraft doesn't mean that the designers weren't concerned with the radar return,” said Laslie, who added that it's “reasonable” to expect a 10 percent decrease to the aircraft's signature by augmenting Block III jets with additional RAM coating.
Shining a spotlight on the Super Hornet's low observable attributes may have helped sell Trump on future orders, Aboulafia speculated.
“It might be useful in the real world too, but in a much more marginal way,” he said.
One of those benefits, according to Laslie, is that the LO performance upgrade could also enable the Navy to be more flexible in its mission planning. An aircraft can be more or less easily detected by radar depending on how it is positioned or the route used by the plane, so having more radar-absorbing materials on the Super Hornet could give the pilot more options.
“I think what the Navy is doing is trying to maybe reduce enough of the cross section of the F-18 in high intensity combat scenarios,” Laslie said.
“I don't think they're trying to make the F/A-18 a stealth aircraft,” he continued. “But if they can reduce the radar cross section enough that in certain scenarios it is more difficult to pick the Super Hornet up, that would be of benefit to the Navy.”
While the president has done much to focus public attention on the Super Hornet's upcoming LO upgrade, the Block III actually offers a relatively modest increase in stealth compared to earlier concepts floated by Boeing.
In 2013, when the company began evaluating how to attract future sales from the Navy as production slowed, it started promoting an “Advanced Super Hornet” configuration that would have improved the aircraft's signature by 50 percent. That version of the jet included structural enhancements and an enclosed weapons pod, but Boeing ultimately stepped away from that concept.
“Those big compromises you have to make to get the higher levels of stealth like putting your weapons in a bay, we don't think that's a necessary part of the Block III story for the Super Hornet,” Gillian said.
30 mars 2022 | International, Aérospatial
Canada plans to buy 88 new fighter jets to replace its CF-18s.
19 février 2021 | International, Terrestre
BAE Systems announced Thursday that it has received a $50 million order from the Norwegian Army for 20 additional CV90 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, bring its total fleet to 164 vehicles.
13 décembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
By Tony Osborne LONDON – Britain's aerospace industry is waking up to Brexit certainty after Prime Minister Boris Johnson secured a landslide majority in a Dec. 12 general election. Johnson's Conservative party secured a significant majority in the British Parliament – the largest since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s - which will enable him to push through his vision of Brexit on Jan. 31, 2020 ending Parliamentary and legal deadlocks that have delayed the UK's departure from the EU since the original date of March 29, 2019. For aerospace, the Parliamentary majority means stability in planning and investment, and there are unlikely to be any more delays to the process. It should also mean that the threat of a no-deal Brexit – widely considered the worst-case scenario for aerospace – has largely evaporated for now. The current iteration of the withdrawal agreement between Britain and the EU calls for regulatory alignment with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), but the two sides still have to negotiate future trade agreements once the UK has exited the EU. A lack of agreement here could result in a no-deal. British aerospace and defense trade association ADS said it was looking forward to working with the new government but said that ministers needed to “deliver a close future relationship with the European Union." In a statement, ADS CEO Paul Everitt called on the government to push forward with “investments in innovation and green technologies, develop a defense and security industrial strategy and an ambitious national space program.” Airbus, one of the most vocal aerospace companies against Brexit, said it welcomed the fact that the British government now has a “clear mandate” and is looking forward to “positive discussions.” “Airbus remains concerned by the potential for a ‘no-deal' in December 2020 and we will continue to plan for that scenario as that is the only way any responsible business can plan,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue to run our major Brexit project in order to further eradicate and/or mitigate risks.” If the election result made Brexit more likely, it makes the break-up of the UK more probable too after the Scottish National Party (SNP) secured 48 of the 59 Parliamentary seats in Scotland. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said the result was a mandate for a second Scottish independence referendum. The Conservative government is unlikely to green-light such a referendum, but independence would have significant ramifications for UK defense given the presence of several airbases and the UK's ballistic missile submarines carrying the nuclear deterrent. https://aviationweek.com/defense/brexit-certainty-after-boris-johnson-election-landslide