By Geoff Fein
The Navy’s all-weather, airborne early warning battle management aircraft, the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, flew its first mission system flight, with its radar operating, earlier this month, and the second aircraft has begun flight testing at Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] St. Augustine, Fla., facility.
The mission system flight lasted four and a half hours and included more than two and a half hours of radar operation, a Naval Air Systems Command spokeswoman told Defense Daily earlier this week.
“The team has started analyzing the data from this test,” she said.
The Navy had been preparing aircraft number one for the mission system flight for sometime, Capt. Randy Mahr, NAVAIR Hawkeye program manager, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
The second aircraft, “Delta Two,” took to the air Nov. 29 at Northrop Grumman’s St. Augustine Manufacturing and Flight Test Center, the NAVAIR spokeswoman said.
“The flight was just over two hours to test air vehicle qualities,” she said. “The aircraft flew again Dec. 4 and is flying as scheduled by the team.”
The second aircraft is more heavily instrumented and is focusing on mission systems, radars, computers and everything else, Mahr said.
Before the Navy could fly “Delta Two,” the service needed to make sure the aircraft cleared enough of the envelope with the first one, Mahr added. That included going through all the engine start ups and shut downs in flight.
That process was reached on Nov. 19 and resulted in flight clearance for the second E-2D, Mahr said.
The first E-2D flew for the first time back in August and has almost 20 flights on it, Mahr said.
“The first one was instrumented for air vehicle performance, so we have a wing boom on it, a lot more engine instrumentation on it than we do on the second aircraft,” he said.
The Navy and Northrop Grumman have been operating the radar at the company’s Bethpage, N.Y., facility.
“There is a roof top antenna there that rotates and we are radiating from the lab through the antenna, and we have taken it up to 50 percent power,” Mahr said. “We’ve found no more than the usual problems…little software glitches and things like that have to be fixed, but so far so good.”
The Navy has completed all the sweeps in frequency and now they are starting the sweeps in azimuth, Mahr added.
“Testing (sweeps) at varying operating frequencies and power levels have been underway at the Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Bethpage integration facility using the radar and antenna,” the NAVAIR spokeswoman said. “Radar performance is meeting expectations. Testing of the electronic scan capability used to vary azimuth will be started after the holidays.”
Lockheed Martin [LMT] makes the radar for the E-2D.
The E-2D program is progressing well, Mahr said.
“Had things worked out I would have been a little further along than I am. We had a couple of the others come up…one was the hydraulic lines,” he said. “We had to go back through and do a hydraulic line inspection.”
The Navy ended up doing more of an inspection than originally planned, Mahr added.
“When we got into it, we said we really wanted to do the whole airplane, just because we found a couple of places where there was potential chaffing,” he said.
The Navy knew it would have to go in sooner or later and fix the problem, so it decided to go in and fix the airplane now.
“We fixed the ED-2 completely, so there is no more chaffing,” Mahr said. “That held us on the ground for a little while.”
About 45 days, Mahr noted.
“We got all that behind us. We did some other ground testing while that was going on, then we got back into the air,” he added.
Another issue that surfaced was a glitch in the software environment, Mahr said.
The Navy found it had a problem with the angle of attack indexer, which tells Navy aircraft when they are approaching a carrier, if they are coming in too fast or too slow.
The airplane’s status that was being reported to the data bus was being reported incorrectly. The data bus didn’t know what to do and it was shutting down because of that, Mahr explained. “So we had to work our way through that one.”
“Like anything else, you find most of [those] things in the lab,” Mahr added. “The Northrop Grumman lab and the Lockheed Martin lab have been doing excellent work wringing out the system. But every once in a while one slips through and gets in the airplane.”
Next Spring the Navy will begin testing the E-2D’s radar against live targets. The Navy will use some F-18s and other Navy aircraft as targets, Mahr said.
“Basically the point then is to know where the target is, and know where we think it is,” he said. “Make sure the mission computers are reporting it all correctly.”
Flight tests will continue in St. Augustine through calendar year ’08, Mahr said.
“There will be a brief time next summer when we will have one airplane up here (at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md.) for a couple of months, but really they are going to be in St. Augustine,” he said. “They will come up here in early ’09 and that’s when we will start the land work at the Navy’s facility out here for both carrier launches, using the catapult gear and the arresting gear.”
Once the Navy gets through that in ’09, they will take the E-2D out to an actual aircraft carrier and do testing out there, probably in late ’09 or early ’10, Mahr said.