While Boeing [BA] officials said that they’ve had to conduct in-person meetings on the classified part of the B-52 Radar Modernization Program (RMP), they finished a three-day preliminary design review (PDR) of RMP via Cisco‘s [CSCO] WebEx last week with 250 people, as the program looks forward to an RMP electronic warfare (EW) interoperability PDR in December.
“We got positive [PDR] feedback from the government, and we have some actions to work through, and we’ll probably get those cleaned up in the next few weeks or so,” Mike Riggs, Boeing’s RMP program manager, said in a telephone interview on Oct. 29.
None of the action items were significant technological ones, he said, as they were largely confined to contractual matters and chart clean up, he said.
RMP includes a new, active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar based on Raytheon‘s [RTX] APG-79; a new, wide-band radome by L3Harris [LHX] on the aircraft’s nose; two L3Harris 8 x 20 inch high definition displays for the radar navigator and the navigator; two new, hand controllers by California-based Mason Controls; and new display sensor system processors by L3Harris to interface between the radar and other B-52 systems.
The EW interoperability PDR is slated for December. The program completed other subsystem PDRs in July and August for the new radome, the active electronically scanned array radar, the displays, the display sensor system processors, the hand controllers, and the system software (Defense Daily, Sept. 25)
The EW interoperability “interface is somewhat dependent on the radar provider,” Riggs said. “Once Raytheon was chosen, that defined how we would do some of the EW interoperability.”
RMP does not include new B-52 EW systems. The 76 B-52Hs rely on a variety of EW systems against threats, such as air defense radars. Current B-52 EW systems include the L3Harris AN/ALQ-172 and the Northrop Grumman [NOC] AN/ALQ-155.
Construction is underway on a high bay building in Oklahoma City, Okla., that is to house Boeing’s Radar System Integration Lab (RSIL). The building next to Tinker AFB will allow systems testing on a B-52H fuselage and wing and an AESA radar on the roof.
“We will have the ability to test the [radar] system end to end,” Riggs said. “We’ll have the B-52 avionics in there and hook that up to the AESA transmitting to a B-52 radome. Before we go to flight test, we can test it out in RSIL.”
RMP’s critical design review (CDR), which would lock system design in place, is slated for late next year or early 2022.
RMP initial operational capability (IOC) on 11 B-52s is to come in 2026. RMP is to include increased system reliability and maintainability, improving mapping, synthetic aperture radar imagery, navigation accuracy in GPS-denied environments, a better weather map, and search and track for ground moving targets and aerial targets.
The B-52’s current APQ-166 terrain-following and mapping radar by Northrop Grumman “is based on 1960s technology, last modified in the 1980s, with a 63 percent rate-of-failure during operations,” the Air Force said in its fiscal 2018 acquisition report, the most recent one the service has released. “This [RMP] radar upgrade will maintain platform viability through 2050. The program began in fiscal year 2017 and the acquisition strategy was approved in March 2018. Production is planned to begin in fiscal year 2024, with the planned delivery of 76 radars from 2025 through 2029.”
The 2024 production date is a year delay from what the Air Force said in its fiscal 2017 acquisition report.
RMP initial operational capability (IOC) on 11 B-52s is to come in 2026. RMP is to include increased system reliability and maintainability, improving mapping, synthetic aperture radar imagery, navigation accuracy in GPS-denied environments, a better weather map, and search and track for ground moving targets and aerial targets.
In June, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) annual acquisition report said that RMP officials projected next March as the development start of the program–six months behind schedule (Defense Daily, Sept. 3). The GAO report said that “providing input into the prime contractor’s solicitation process took longer than expected and involved establishing a framework to vet program requirements.”
The Air Force requested $168 million for RMP in fiscal 2021. Because of the GAO’s projected six-month slip in Milestone B, the House Appropriations Committee recommended cutting that amount by $10.9 million in the committee’s version of the fiscal 2021 defense funding bill.
The Air Force’s Milestone B decision is expected in late February, and Boeing expects an RMP engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract next spring.