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| Press Release Number: EPX200304082 | 08-Apr-03 |
Prowler hones future weapon system |
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By JIM JENKINS NAS Patuxent River Public Affairs Department PATUXENT RIVER NAVAL AIR STATION, MD-The EA-6B Prowler will soon get its largest weapons system upgrade in approximately 15 years thanks to a team of pilots and engineers here and at NAVAIR China Lake. Pilots from Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 23 returned from the desert test facility in Southern California wrapping up the last phase of the new system's developmental test phase, called DTIID. "We went out there to get a look at a little different environment," said Lt. Cmdr. Rob Croxson, lead project officer. "So we took our two aircraft out there and flew a bunch of hours and a bunch of flight tests." The Improved Capability Modification III weapons system, referred to as ICAP III, is expected to be the Navy's future of electronic attack until at least year 2025. As the Prowler is phased out, the system will migrate to its replacement, the F/A-18G, and maybe the Marine Corps' electronic attack Joint Strike Fighter variant of the X-35. "There's also been some talk about putting it on Air Force platforms like the B-52," said Maj. Andy Mercier, project coordinator, "so this receiver system really is the electronic attack system for the United States probably for the next 20 years. The test bed for it right now is the EA-6B, but it is going to grow beyond that in the future." Most developmental flight tests were completed here at Pax River's Atlantic Test Range, the Aircraft Combat Test and Evaluation Facility, and the Shielded Hangar facilities. The test team went to California, though, to see how the system performed in and around higher elevations. Mercier and Croxson spent three months in the desert working the bugs out and honing the weapons system's capabilities. "The three months we spent out at the Lake was the last phase of developmental test," Mercier said. "Here at Pax River where things are relatively flat and there aren't a lot of mountains we saw one level of performance, and then when we took it out west where there are a lot of mountains and the elevation is higher, we saw a different performance and the software had to be tweaked to compensate for that. So we really just entered a new phase of development and continued it in a new environment." The ICAP III weapon system, slated to be ready for the fleet in April 2005, is very software-intensive, according to Mercier, and operates with more precision than ICAP II. Whereas the ICAP II receiver can tell you the bearing of a threat (such as a surface-to-air-missile system using radar), ICAP III can actually tell you what spot on the ground a threat is coming from. ICAP III also has what the contractor, Northrop Grumman, calls "selective reactive capability." "[ICAP III] can find things quickly and react to them," Mercier said. "It can also see changes in the way those things are operating and react to those changes quickly." Along with the new ICAP III receiver, the upgrade adds new displays and computers bringing the Prowler cockpit up to date. "The system we had was [19]70s, 80s technology," Croxson said, "[ICAP III] also gives us better reliability and maintainability." Making the ICAP III system come to fruition was not an easy task. The hardest part, according to Mercier, is getting past the EA-6B's primary task, jamming. The weapon system can jam itself. So, special care must be taken to make sure the receiver does not operate at the same time as the Prowler's jammer. "You're essentially building a state-of-the-art receiver from the ground up," Mercier said. "The added challenge of doing that on a jammer platform is that you have to work around the jamming. So if you wanted to build a receiver and set it on a desk and have it find things in the environment, piece of cake. But take that receiver and tell it it can only look at the environment a small fraction of the time because the rest of the time it has to be shut down to keep from being damaged by the jamming, that's a whole lot harder. And not only can you only look at the environment a small percentage of the time, but you can't take that all at once. You've got to look, and then not look, then look, then not look. And as you collect pulses you have to put them all back together again." The primary mission of the EA-6B Prowler is to be a jammer. Because of that, most of the time there is high-power radio-frequency energy being emitted from the aircraft. No receiver can survive in that environment, Mercier said. When the transmitter is jamming, the receiver has to shut itself down. "In order to be able to see what's out there you can give up a little bit of time - we call it duty cycle - to look with the receiver," Mercier said. "But it's not very often, and it's not all in a row. You have to chop it up into pieces to be effective with the jammer. So that's the challenge, that's the huge challenge." -USN- Photo available upon request. |
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