Northrop Grumman announced Nov. 18 the first successful demonstration flight of the company’s newest Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) fighter sensor, the Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR).
SABR is being developed as a significant avionics enhancement for the existing fleet of F-16s and other fighter aircraft worldwide.
“This first flight marks a major milestone in our effort to develop an AESA radar designed specifically to meet current F-16 power, cooling, and interface requirements,” Arlene Camp, director of Advanced F-16 Radar Programs at Northrop Grumman, said in a statement. “Although designed specifically for the F-16, SABR is scalable and adaptable to other platforms and missions.”
SABR completed its first flight ahead of schedule on Nov. 16, successfully detecting and displaying numerous aerial targets, and exceeding first flight predictions, Camp said.
“This demonstration flight is the first in a series scheduled over the next few weeks as we transition SABR from a laboratory environment to an operational flight environment,” Camp said. “The Sabreliner testbed aircraft has an actual F-16 radome and avionics. We’ve used the Sabreliner for more than 20 years for developing and testing F-16 mechanically scanned radar hardware and software. It’s as close as you’re going to get to a real F-16 flight demonstration.”
Additionally, she said, “SABR is Northrop Grumman’s investment toward enhancing and sustaining the F-16’s combat capability for decades to come. We plan to demonstrate SABR on an F-16 next year.”
Compared to the mechanically scanned array radars it is designed to replace, SABR will provide the increased performance, multi-functionality, and greater reliability inherent in AESA radars. The improved situational awareness, greater detection, high-resolution synthetic aperture radar, and interleaved air-to-air and air-to-surface
mode operations will provide pilots true all-environment precision strike capability.