The Navy’s new E-2D Advanced Hawkeye surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft has a powerful new radar.
Exactly how powerful no one will say.
“It can probably watch the pistachios pop in Iran,” said a Lexington Institute analyst.
But the Navy may have to wait awhile before it receives the upgraded version of the E-2 family. While development of the aircraft is on track, and two test versions of the plane have been delivered and have passed 1,000 hours of flight time, the Pentagon and Congress for budgetary reasons have slowed down its delivery pace.
The result will be an estimated delay of 12 to 24 months before the Navy can begin to integrate the E-2D into the fleet, according to the Government Accountability Office in a recent assessment of the Pentagon’s major weapons acquisition programs.
Rebecca Grant, who recently wrote a report on the aircraft for the Lexington Institute, said she would not characterize the program as being “off track,” but any further cuts would push delivery back and increase the per unit cost of the aircraft.
Costs can mount when a new aircraft transitions from low-rate to full-rate production, Grant said. Congress cut funding for one aircraft in the 2009 budget. The Pentagon chopped a second that was slated for 2010.
The slowdown means technicians and managers will be in place without enough work. The Navy may have to go back to suppliers of the subsystems to renegotiate contracts since such items must be procured years in advance, Grant said.
“That always worries industry and program managers when that happens,” she said in an interview.
“It’s hard to manage a program well on terms favorable to the government when the program whiplashes around,” Grant wrote in the report.
GAO agreed. The delay may result in a 20 percent increase in the per unit cost of the Hawkeye. It now totals $208 million per aircraft, up from $190 million in 2003 when development began.
The delivery pace was one factor that led to a Nunn-McCurdy breach in June, according to press reports. The Navy notified Congress that the program had exceeded 25 percent of its 2003 baseline estimate. The news came just as the program had passed its milestone C review, which means the technology is working as promised and Northrop can move ahead with low rate production.
The office of the secretary of defense, meanwhile, has allowed to program to go forward despite the overruns.
So far, there is not any talk of reducing the total number of aircraft the Navy plans to acquire — currently 75 through the year 2022, including five for test and evaluation.
“The Navy still plans on buying 75. That has not changed. It was strictly a budget issue last year and we anticipate that there will be no impact on the program going forward,” said John Beaulieu, E-2 new business manager at Naval Air Systems Command at the IDEX conference in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Grant said: “The real risk is if there are any more delays, then you’re looking at … a couple of years difference. The threats are out there now. The Navy could use the E-2D as soon as it shows up.”
Lead contractor Northrop Grumman and the Navy conducted developmental testing until June on two demonstration aircraft at the company’s East Coast Manufacturing Center in St. Augustine, Fla. The two aircraft then flew to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., to begin aircraft carrier suitability testing.
Nicknamed the “eyes of the fleet,” the surveillance and reconnaissance platform is well known to aircraft carrier crews as the oddly shaped twin-propeller plane that flies with a saucer-shaped radar rotor-dome fixed to its top. The new version looks about the same.
Northrop Grumman executives went to the IDEX conference to tell potential foreign customers that the E-2D may look like its predecessor the E-2C on the outside, but the inside of the aircraft is a complete redesign.
“The only similarity to the E-2C and the E-2D is the shadow it casts on the tarmac,” Beaulieu said.
Unlike many of the programs listed in the acquisitions report, the GAO gave the E-2D program high marks for developing the new technology on schedule.
The key capability being touted is the new Lockheed Martin-built APY-9 radar, which will increase the amount of territory it can monitor by 300 percent. That’s 6 million cubic miles with the ability to track 2,000 objects simultaneously, said Jim Culmo, vice president of airborne early warning and battle management command at Northrop Grumman.
While watching pistachios pop in Iran is a colorful exaggeration, Grant said this new capability will allow operators to pick up small threats such as cruise missiles. The legacy E-2C could detect low-flying bombs skimming over the surface of the water, but adversaries are building faster and stealthier versions.
The new radar will have three modes. It can rotate to make a 360-degree big picture sweep. If it picks up an object of interest, it can slow the radar down in order to concentrate power in a 45-degree swath to provide more detailed coverage. And if an operator decides one object needs special attention, he or she can stop the rotation, and send all the radar energy toward one spot. Grant described this as a “multi-generational leap” over the legacy APS-145 radar system.
Program managers said the new radar will improve the system’s ability to detect objects over land by using on-board computer processing power to filter out the clutter such as buildings, mountains or other terrain.
It will also have a configuration that will allow it to land on short runways or even public roads, Culmo said. That might make the new version more attractive to foreign customers since it will not be tied to an aircraft carrier.
“What it really means is that this system provides the greatest detection range by providing the deep reach intelligence that is required,” Beaulieu said.
The curvature of the Earth makes detecting low-flying cruise missiles problematic for ship-based radar, Grant pointed out. Navy vessels can peer out about 20 miles, but having an aircraft do the same job extends this to 200 miles or more, she said.
The new radar is a “set and forget” system. There is no need to switch between air and surface surveillance. This is done automatically, Culmo said. Also on board is a communications system that managers promise will allow crews to communicate with all joint forces and allies. A Navy F/A-18 fighter jet can receive E-2D cues and engage targets with an air-to-air missile.
Beaulieu said: “Interoperability is a very, very important aspect. It’s fine to have this airborne early warning system up in the air, but if you cannot communicate with not only our own forces, but our allies around the world, it does not do us, or them, much good.”
“Gone are the days when you need all the decision makers in the aircraft. It means that the same picture that the operators see in the aircraft can be seen in other areas in the battle space,” he said. This gives commanders a wide degree of flexibility as to where they make their decisions, he said.
Inside, the five-person crew will be watching the battle space on 20-inch flat-screen monitors that can call up multiple types of information. The pilot or co-pilot can also call up the sensor data on their cockpit screens, so one of them can serve as a fourth sensor operator, according to the Lexington Institute report.
The electronics are all open architecture, meaning upgrades will not be as costly, Beaulieu said. The E-2Ds will be in the Navy’s inventory for 50 years, so the service wanted the ease of integrating new technologies as they come on line. “So we don’t end up have up having hundreds of millions of dollars in development programs every 10 years,” Culmo added.
Another new capability will be in-air refueling. Grant said in this day and age, it’s ridiculous to have E-2Cs flying without this capability.
As far as the E2-D, the ability to refuel while in flight is necessary. It is a heavier aircraft than its predecessor and will need more fuel to stay aloft longer. Refueling can extend mission time. And in case of an emergency on the flight deck, such as an accident, it will allow the aircraft to circle until it is safe to land, she said.
Grant said all this new capability adds up to an aircraft that will have applications beyond the Navy. The E-2C was a specialized aircraft. The ability to peer at targets deep inside a nation makes the next-generation aircraft useful to all the services.
“It won’t only be the eyes of the fleet, it will be the eyes of the joint forces commander as well,” she said.
Northrop Grumman executives who attended the IDEX conference clearly hope that some of the slack in the slowdown of the U.S. buys can be taken up by foreign military sales. Egypt, Japan, Taiwan, France and Singapore currently fly variants of the E-2C.
Several new features means that the new Hawkeye isn’t necessarily tied down to aircraft carriers, they said. For example, fuel tanks can be added to the wings if a nation doesn’t have aerial refueling capability. It also has the ability to power itself up without being attached to a ship-based generator. And the open architecture means foreign customers can add or subtract features depending on their needs.
“The international customer market is not beholden to ‘here’s the E-2D, take it or leave it,’” Culmo said.
Congress has been notified that the United Arab Emirates is interested in buying three aircraft. There are discussions with several other nations, Beaulieu said, but he declined to name them.