Air Warrior Col. John W. Thompson - KMI Media Group

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Special Sction: Countermeasures That protection is critical, literally a matter of life and death for crew members on SOF and other U.S. military aircraft. Consider, for example, an incident involving an MV-22 Osprey flown by a Marine Corps pilot in Iraq, where enemies mounted an intense missile attack directed at the aircraft. Bill Kasting, ATK vice president and general manager for defense electronic systems, explained how, a few months ago, that Marine Corps pilot spoke to ATK employees who work on the AAR-47 sensor system that is mounted on aircraft such as the Marine pilot’s Osprey to detect incoming missiles. The Marine pilot described how his Osprey was fired upon by multiple missiles. Fortunately, the pilot’s MV-22 was equipped with the ATK AAR-47 sensor system, which immediately detected the incoming missiles. “The AAR-47 actually alerted them to the situation, and they were allowed to perform their evasive maneuvers and deploy the countermeasures, and they really felt that the [AAR- ]47 was the primary reason they were able to survive that engagement,” Kasting said in an interview with SOTECH. ATK makes the sensor that swiftly detects incoming threats, while others make the system that deploys countermeasures to confuse an incoming missile, neutralizing the enemy weapon. The AAR-47 sensor is designed to work with the ALE-47 chaff dispenser provided by Symetrics Industries. AAR-47 sensor units, which are small and light so they don’t hog aircraft space and payload capacity, utilize dual sensor capabilities. “One is the UV sensor,” Kasting explained. “It’s non-imaging UV, which is the primary sensor to detect a missile firing. And then there’s also a laser warning sensor integrated into that [system unit] as well, that detects laser threats. [The AAR-47] is actually the only system out there today that integrates laser warning and missile warning into a single sensor.” The AAR-47 system currently is mounted on Navy and Marine Corps rotary wing aircraft including “the UH-60s, the 8 | SOTECH 8.9 Bill Kasting CH-53s, the UH-1 and the MV-22,” Kasting said. “It’s also deployed on several fixed wing aircraft: the C-17, the C-130s and also some of the smaller aircraft.” The Navy recently awarded ATK a $67 million indefinite delivery/ indefinite quantity contract to produce AAR-47s. Improvements in the AAR-47 include enhanced capabilities to pick out and identify incoming enemy missiles, even when they are flying in airspace cluttered with a confusion of other traffic, Kasting said. ATK also is working on improvements to the AAR-47 so it will tell the ALE-47 countermeasures dispenser the direction from which the enemy missile is arriving, allowing countermeasures to be dispensed just in that direction. ATK is now working on the nextgeneration sensor system, which would so precisely track the exact location of an incoming enemy missile that the sensor could guide a different type of countermeasures system, such as a directional infrared countermeasures system that can defeat the heat-seeking infrared homing guidance systems on man-portable air defense missiles, Kasting said. Another advancement will be sensors identifying smaller, but still potentially lethal, threats short of enemy missiles, such as small-arms fire up to unguided rocket propelled grenades, Kasting said. These are major advancements from the primitive countermeasures systems of years ago. In the not-so-distant past, these systems were analog-based designs. Today, everything is a micro-processor based digital solution. Hardware is still important, but more off-the-shelf hardware is being used to take advantage of the high level of processing available in today’s commercial marketplace, such as multicore processors and graphical processing units, said Michael Maas, technology director of survivability and protection solutions for BAE Systems, a global defense, security and aerospace company. “Just like your home personal computer, the capabilities and function of future solutions will be determined as much by the software as by the hardware,” he says. “Our military customers are looking for product solutions that reduce the overall weight of the self protection suite and have higher reliability, resulting in lower life cycle cost and higher mission availability.” BAE has recently unveiled the Boldstroke, an integrated aircraft survivability system for the U.S. Army’s Common Infrared Countermeasures program. The Boldstroke is a modular, lightweight and directable infrared countermeasure suite designed to protect the Army’s helicopter fleet from current and evolving threats, as well as multiple, simultaneous ones. It features a pointer-tracker system to support direct or fiber-coupled lasers, and a single rigid optical bench for easy assembly, alignment and stability in a flight environment. BAE Systems has more than 15,000 infrared and electronic countermeasures systems fielded worldwide on both fixed and rotary wing aircraft. The company’s AN/AAR-57 Common Missile Warning System (CMWS) has logged more than 1.4 million combat flight hours in protecting aircrews, for example, providing missile warning for rotary and fixed wing aircraft with a low false-alarm rate and the ability to detect and declare prior to missile burnout. It also features stabilized imagery during high-speed maneuvers to permit rapid threat detection and notification, ensuring the highest probability of successful threat countermeasures. The CMWS is compatible with existing chaff/flare/RF decoy dispensers and directional IR countermeasure systems. The current challenge for the vendor, Maas said, is to develop and field systems faster so that they’re not one or two generations behind the commercial market, which doubles capability every 18 months, as the popular Moore’s Law has proven out. They need to work in extreme temperatures, with state-of-the-art processors that have high-power densities so they can “run hot.” Getting that kind of heat performance when “operating in the high ambient temperatures seen in the desert during the summertime is very challenging,” Maas said. “It’s hard to believe, but available packaging volume and its associated thermal cooling limitation is one of most difficult factors www.SOTECH-kmi.com
and in many ways can limit overall performance and reliability.” There’s also a need to develop system-level architectures that can accept updated processing elements without having to do a total redesign of the hardware and software. As in the commercial market, military customers want a system in which they can unplug a video card from a personal computer and replace it with a newer and more powerful card by simply loading new “software drivers” with no need to change the operational software. “Also, I believe that, just like your home computer’s ability to run multiple simultaneous programs, these future systems will support multifunctional capabilities through multicore parallel processing,” Maas added. The market for these products is not huge—just $10 million to $15 million annually per contract—but it’s a healthy, steady demand, said Mike Shoemaker, vice president of sales and marketing for Alloy Surfaces Company Inc., a Chester Township, Pa.-based subsidiary of the Chemring Group that manufactures infrared air countermeasures and is said to be the only manufacturer of special material decoys (SMDs). Its MJU-49/B, a special material decoy pyrophoric infrared (IR) countermeasure has been developed and manufactured for the U.S. Navy, designed to defend helicopters and jet aircraft from missile threats worldwide. It emits IR energy in the same band as an aircraft, and can be employed using the ALE-39 series or any countermeasure dispensing system capable of employing a round 36 mm flare. It contains no pyrotechnics other than a CCU-136 squib, required to expel the SMD from the flare casing. Once expelled, the SMD reacts with oxygen to rapidly oxidize and generate an IR signature. However, the temperature is less than half the temperature of conventional materials, and SMD is considered extremely safe to handle. An AC-130U gunship jettisons flares over an area near Hurlburt Field, Fla. The flares are a countermeasure for heat-seeking missiles that may be fired at the aircraft during real world missions. The aircraft is from the 4th Special Operations Squadron. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force] A formation of C-130 Hercules aircraft fire off chaff and flare countermeasures over the Nevada Test and Training Range during a mobility exercise. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force] Another product, the company’s MJU- 52/B, was developed with the United States Naval Surfaces Warfare Center to offer preemptive protection to fast jet fighters and fighter bombers. The MJU-52/B utilizes special material, Alloy Surfaces’ proprietary patented technology to emit IR energy to decoy missiles. It is manufactured in plastic trays and is deployed upon command with an electrical impulse to initiate a mechanical dispenser. The MJU-52/B can be ejected from any Bol Dispenser Series. It requires no pyrotechnics to expel this special material and is virtually unobservable to the naked eye. The technologies for these systems have evolved as the missiles that the aircraft are seeking to avoid have evolved, Shoemaker said. The relatively simple Vietnam-era of magnesium Teflon countermeasure systems has given way to a material mix that emits energy in two regions of the infrared spectrum as an evasive tactic. There are many different combinations now used in materials and composition, although most of this information is proprietary. “We’ll call this a cocktail,” he said. “You’ll have two or three different flares in the airplane and put them out in a different sequence— just like you do with a cocktail, mixing www.SOTECH-kmi.com SOTECH 8.9 | 9
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