Northrop plans C-130 AESA upgrade

Northrop Grumman is planning to install the AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar, originally developed for the F-16, into the C-130 family. The C-130 is currently only equipped with a weather radar. By installing an AESA radar, the crew will get a better picture of what's on the ground, as well as what's around them in the air. It will increase their situational awareness by an order of magnitude. The new radar will also be installed in the AC-130J. They'll be able to identify targets on the ground at long range, with a significantly greater resolution than they currently have with existing sensors. The detection range of the radar is approximately 75 miles, and an identification range of around 52 miles.

Northrop Grumman plans to install Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR) radar to C-130 Hercules. The British Janes publication quoted the director of Northrop Grumman's Scalable Agile Beam Radar program, Mark Rossi, saying that while the AN/APG-83 was designed for the F-16, the C-130 community is interested in the SABR technology.

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a reply to: Zaphod58

Just as a curious layman, I wonder if you might know why more improved radar systems are not (as I would think ideal) distributed almost universally across all military platforms? I understand power, and technology incompatibilities between newer and older aircraft, but I would think that for any aircraft, seeing more, further, in better resolution would the the design goal, operationally speaking.

I hope it's not a money thing... I really hope it's not that.

a reply to: Maxmars

It's partly a money thing, but a bigger part is that a lot of aircraft just don't need the advanced capabilities. A C-5 having incredible situational awareness is great, but do they really NEED to be able to see other aircraft at 80 miles. A KC-135 would make sense to be able to detect their receivers as they're approaching, but that's what TCAS is for, in addition to other systems already onboard. Tankers in a conflict are also going to be operating near an AWACS, so they'll have radar coverage of their mission area.

Most of the C-130 fleet doesn't really need the upgrade, but it would go a long way for the specialized aircraft in the family, like the HC, MC, and AC-130 variants. The HC and MC are used for Combat Search and Rescue and Special Operations insertion and extraction missions, so having the ability to see things on the ground in high resolution, beyond their onboard FLIR and camera systems, would go a very long way. So would the ability to see aircraft approaching their mission area. The same goes for most transports. They're not going to be operating in combat areas, except in the most extreme cases, and they'll have AWACS coverage for those missions too.

The best upgrade for the non-combat portion of the military fleet is weather radar upgrades. They're going to be using that much more than they would something like SABR. SABR has the ability to do weather radar, but you don't need a $2.6M per copy radar system for that. The KC-135R, Block 20 (the current block is being upgraded to the Block 45), changed to the Collins FMR-200X color weather radar. It provides a 2.5 degree wide by 2.1 degree high beam from a flat plate phased array antenna, including forward looking windshear detection. Those radars will run closer to $300,000 a unit, while giving them great coverage for weather events.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thanks... I imagined that I might be thinking in idealist terms... But the realist in me knows that tech is not a 'widget' thing, and all air frames aren't going to necessarily need cutting edge tech to perform their mission.

I just had visions of exorbitant costs passed on to the military for repurposed pre-existing tech ... I'm just cynical that way... I'm working on that.

a reply to: Maxmars

There's a lot that gets changed from off the shelf tech. It starts out off the shelf, but then the Pentagon requires some changes. A C-40 looks like a 737, but they're required to add rubberized fuel bladders in the fuel tanks, and instead of the double redundancy required in commercial aircraft, they're required to have triple redundancy in multiple systems on board. SABR uses technology from the APG-77 off the F-22, and the APG-81 from the F-35, which helps with cost.