By 
The U.S. Navy successfully completed a ballistic missile defense flight test with the AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) off the west coast of Hawaii last week, the Navy said Thursday.
The flight test, called Vigilant Titan, started with the launch of a medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) target from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Kauai, Hawaii, on July 26. Next, the SPY-6 searched for, detected, and maintained track on the target throughout its trajectory.
SPY-6 is being developed by Raytheon [RTN] for the upcoming Flight III version of the Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 destroyer. It is designed to provide increased range, sensitivity and discrimination accuracy compared to the SPY-1 radar used on existing DDG-51s.
The Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) said this is the second in a series of ballistic missile defense flight tests for the AN/SPY-6(V) AMDR. The SPY-6 first began tracking ballistic missile targets in tests out of Hawaii in March (Defense Daily, March 31).
The Navy noted that using preliminary data, the test appeared to successfully meet its primary objectives against the complex MRBM target. AMDR program officials will continue to evaluate the system performance based on the telemetry and other test data to validate the results.
“We are continuing to stress this radar by increasing the range and complexity of the targets and demonstrating the awesome capability and versatility of the Navy’s next generation Integrated Air and Missile Defense radar,” Navy Capt. Seiko Okano, major program manager for Above Water Sensors, for PEO IWS, said in a statement.
Raytheon won a $327 million contract modification for the first three low-rate initial production (LRIP) units of SPY-6 in May (Defense Daily, May 5). The company views this as a franchise program.
