Advanced ‘Frankenradar’ prototype for Typhoon
September 30, 2024
The prototype of the advanced new ECRS.Mk 2 radar for Typhoon flew for the first time from BAE Systems’ Warton Aerodrome on Friday 27 September. The first Tranche 3 Typhoon the first Tranche 3 Typhoon (ZK355/BS116), flown by Luke Gili-Ross, took off at 1500 for the first flight of the prototype radar. This was probably as much a shakedown flight for the aircraft as it was a serious radar test flight, after what has been a fairly long lay up.
The ECRS.Mk 2 (European Common Radar System Mark 2, also known as ‘Radar Two’) is an AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) radar and is, Leonardo claims, the world’s most capable active electronically scanned array (AESA) fighter radar.
Air Commodore Nick Lowe, Head of Capability Delivery Combat Air and Typhoon Senior Responsible Officer, RAF, said: “Evolution of Typhoon’s air combat capability is paramount to ensure it continues to deter potential aggressors, defend our nation and defeat our adversaries wherever we need to fly and fight whether for the UK or in our staunch support to the NATO alliance. This first flight of this ECRS Mk2 prototype new radar in the test aircraft is a positive step towards ensuring this.”
ECRS.Mk 2 also brings exceptionally high-powered, focused electronic attack capability. This will give the Typhoon new capabilities, including the ability to locate, identify and suppress enemy air defence systems using new ‘jamming through the radar’ techniques.
This promises to enable the Typhoon to operate in even the most challenging contested environments. This is the kind of environment that would once have been thought the exclusive domain of stealthy, fifth-generation aircraft, but ECRS.Mk 2 promises to allow air forces to operate a single-platform Typhoon fleet, even in the most challenging contested environments, and not simply as an adjunct to fifth-generation fighters. It will also enhance Typhoon’s usefulness in mixed 4th/5th generation operations. The ECRS Mk 2 promises to help create a Typhoon standard that will enhance and augment the capabilities of the RAF’s F-35 force – not just carrying additional weapons to the fight, but bringing advanced capabilities that improve the F-35’s survivability and effectiveness. A Typhoon requirements manager said that: “The force mix, the combination of Typhoon with ECRS Mk 2 and F-35, is greater than the sum of their parts. Leonardo’s electronic warfare division at Luton are literally at the top of the premier league within the EW market, so we’ve got something that genuinely adds capability value, even if you’re operating as part of a coalition with the US.”
A Typhoon equipped with ECRS Mk 2 will be a very survivable platform, so, while the enemy may know that the aircraft is ‘in the area’, its pilot will not have to worry about the aircraft’s signature. A Typhoon formation with ECRS.Mk 2 will be able to operate as what one programme insider described as the “brute squad”, and what one RAF senior officer called “the thug”. The Typhoon will carry large numbers of weapons and “rain down electronic attack and the world’s supply of SPEAR Capability III or SDBs or whatever weapon you want to use, while the fifth-gen aircraft is acting as a silent assassin, sliding around the back to slip the knife in!”
In addition to its formidable wide-band Electronic Attack/Electronic Warfare functionality, and apart from unlocking a real SEAD/DEAD capability, the new radar can simultaneously ‘see’ further than previous fighter radars. It will provide the pilot and weapons system with more precise and accurate (weapons quality) target tracking. Thanks to an innovative repositioner, it will be able to scan a much bigger ‘cake slice’ – looking out at much greater azimuth angles and providing greater range at these higher off-boresight angles.
In a typical beyond visual range missile engagement, this will allow Typhoon pilots to get the ‘first look’ and the ‘first shot’ and enable them to ‘crank’ harder, turning further away from the enemy fighter. This will leave the Typhoon less vulnerable to a return missile shot, while still keeping the target in the radar’s scan and continuing to support a missile in flight with mid-course updates.
Work on an AESA radar for Typhoon began in 2002 with the British and German industry Captor E-Scan Risk Reduction (CECAR) project, which aimed to develop an AESA derivative of the existing Captor, adding a new AESA antenna to the existing Captor-D ‘back end’. A Captor AESA Radar (CAESAR) demonstrator flew on board a UK Ministry of Defence-operated (MoD) BAC One-Eleven on February 24, 2006 and was later flown on the Eurofighter Development Aircraft DA5, beginning on May 8, 2007. At this point the proposed CAESAR-based AESA solution for the Eurofighter incorporated a fixed antenna (like most AESA designs), but the UK, in particular, felt that such an antenna would be handicapped by a more limited scan in azimuth and by reduced range at the edges of azimuth coverage.
To overcome this limitation, Euroradar explored a number of ‘moving AESA’ designs, using a single or double swashplate wide field of regard (WFoR) re-positioner to provide much wider scan limits. The eventual Captor-E was developed using just such a double swashplate re-positioner.
Eurofighter and the NATO Eurofighter and Tornado Management Agency (NETMA) signed a €1bn contract to develop the electronically scanned Captor-E radar on November 19, 2014. Initially, several versions of the basic Captor-E were envisaged to meet different customer requirements, as variants of what was referred to as a European Common Radar System (ECRS).
Competing visions of a Typhoon AESA led to delays, but Eurofighter finally established an AESA radar roadmap in 2012, and a baseline Captor-E AESA radar was developed on a four-nation basis. This now incorporated a dual-swashplate mechanical re-positioner, meaning that the radar ‘beam’ was steered both mechanically and electronically, allowing higher off-boresight angles to be reached, and improving range at high azimuth limits.
Work on Captor-E began using industry funding and an initial radar was fitted to a UK-based Typhoon test aircraft, Instrumented Production Aircraft (IPA) 5 (ZJ700), in time to be shown on static display at the 2014 Farnborough International Airshow. Flight trials began on July 8, 2016, out of BAE Systems’ Warton aerodrome. A German Tranche 3 Eurofighter, IPA8, operated by Airbus Defence and Space, joined the test programme from September 2016, flying from Manching.
The first production variant of the new Captor-E AESA radar (known as Radar One Plus and later as ECRS Mk 0) was developed primarily to meet the requirements of Kuwait and Qatar, and is now in full frontline service. The first Typhoon in Kuwait Air Force configuration – Instrumented Series Production Aircraft (ISPA) 6 – joined the test effort on December 23, 2019. It conducted the so-called ‘E-scan XCR#1’ flight test campaign in March 2020, completing E-scan entry-into-service flight tests and readying the way for deliveries to Kuwait, though these were then delayed by COVID-19.
Hensoldt is developing a new ECRS Mk 1 AESA radar for the German and Spanish Eurofighter fleets. This is a development of the Kuwait/Qatar ECRS.Mk 0, with a new digital multi-channel receiver and new transmitter/receiver LRIs. The German and Spanish aircraft will initially be fitted with exactly the same Mk 0 radar as that supplied to Kuwait and Qatar, but their radars will subsequently be upgraded to Mk 1 standard by retrofitting the new items.
The UK required a more capable and more advanced radar, which would incorporate extensive electronic attack and electronic warfare capabilities, and resisted pressure to adopt ECRS.Mk 0 or Mk 1. This led to a divergence in AESA radar development for the Typhoon.
On 3 September 2020, the UK Ministry of Defence announced that it had awarded BAE Systems and Leonardo a £317m contract to ‘develop’ a next-generation radar for the Royal Air Force’s Eurofighter Typhoon fleet. In fact, development was already underway, a programme insider noting that this September 2020 contract was the fifth cycle of activity that he had personally seen on ECRS Mk 2!
The contract actually covered the integration by BAE Systems of the new Leonardo developed ECRS Mk 2 E-scan radar on the Typhoon, to meet RAF requirements. This test and evaluation contract for ‘Radar Two’ reportedly included the production of five radar sets for flight trials (three of them production standard radars), and some long lead items for production radars. The plan is still to retrofit all 40 of the UK’s Tranche 3 Typhoons with ECRS Mk 2, although there is an option to re-equip Tranche 2 Typhoons as well. Both tranches have the necessary pre-mods to allow the retrofit, but the decision does not need to be made yet.
The contract was the product of ten years of MoD investment in UK radar/EW programmes, although a further ECRS.Mk 2 contract will be needed before the series production phase, even though some long-lead procurement and manufacturing was included in this latest one. While the September 2020 contract was far from being the final step in equipping RAF Typhoons with a new radar, it was a critical step in the long-term air capability plan.
The schedule and planned timeline had been maintained up to that point, giving a degree of confidence that the initial operational capability (IOC) date would be achieved. In fact, when the stimulus of the Finnish HX competition disappeared, funding slowed, and priorities changed. The scheduled 2022 first flight was not achieved, while the planned IOC date for the ECRS.Mk 2 has slipped from soon after 2025 to 2030.
On 17 January 2024, BAE Systems announced that the ECRS.Mk 2 prototype radar had been fitted to the first Tranche 3 Typhoon (ZK355/BS116), prior to flight trials in 2024. This prototype radar reportedly left the Leonardo radar facility at Crewe Toll, Edinburgh, on 16 March, after testing in the roof laboratory there, though other reports suggested that it arrived at BAE Systems’ Warton site on March 31. After arriving at Warton, the radar underwent further testing in Warton’s radar test facility, before being fitted to BS116 on 1 November 2023. There were some hopes that the radar would fly over the Fairford and Farnborough air shows, but resource prioritisation issues delayed certification for flight.
The new ECRS.Mk 2 shares its platform/ weapons-system interface with other Captor-E variants, via the German-supplied attack computer, and it uses the same power generation and cooling, but has no common hardware forward of the power supply, and is actually not based on Captor technology at all.
Instead, Radar Two uses a completely new open-architecture back end, with a completely new processor and receiver, as well as a dedicated EW receiver and techniques generator. This is married to what Leonardo has referred to as a ‘revolutionary’ multi-function array. This will incorporate both gallium arsenide (GaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN) semi-conductors, blending the strengths of these two different technologies to cost-effectively provide a differentiating military capability. Radar Two also employs a completely different system for its antenna re-positioner, using a single rotating joint, like that used on the ES-05 Raven radar fitted to the Gripen E, rather than the double swashplate arrangement of the Captor-E. The aircraft also has a new radome tailored to support the ECRS Mk 2’s wide bandwidth.
The open architecture ECRS.Mk 2 is intended to enable the rapid low-cost development cycles necessary for the radar to be adapted to counter dynamic and developing threats.
The prototype ECRS.Mk 2 is something of a ‘Frankenradar’, incorporating the antenna from the old Bright Adder technology demonstrator and an existing ECRS.Mk 0 ‘back end’!
This is perhaps appropriate, as the ECRS.Mk 2 was derived in part from the Advanced Radar Targeting System (ARTS) and Bright Adder technology demonstrators, and not from the original Captor-C/D radar or the AESA-equipped Captor-E. Although built as a flyable asset, the Bright Adder radar was not flown, however, instead being used in Leonardo’s roof lab at Crewe Toll in Edinburgh, where it successfully demonstrated novel ‘jamming through the radar’ techniques and functionality.
The ECRS Mk 2 test and evaluation (T&E) effort will initially rely heavily on the Bright Adder-based test radar, along with a number of other test radars and the first three production systems.
Tim Bungey, Chief Engineer for ECRS Mk2, Leonardo UK, said that: “In parallel with the trials, the radar’s production design has also been progressing apace. The development of the ECRS Mk2 is fully using the UK’s world-class radar design skills. Over the past few months, its processor, receiver and antenna power supply and control units have all been re-engineered from the prototype design to further enhance the capacity, capability and performance of the Mk2 system in alignment with the new antenna and electronic warfare capability.”
The ECRS.Mk 2 forms a key part of the UK’s long-term vision for Typhoon, establishing a cornerstone of the so-called Eurofighter long-term evolution, and making Typhoon the ideal partner in any fourth/fifth-generation and unmanned force mix for decades to come.
But the ECRS.Mk 2 programme will also preserve some of the key skills that will be needed to keep the UK at the forefront of the global combat air sector, which was a significant ambition of the broader UK 2018 combat air strategy. ECRS.Mk 2 is a critical building block for future combat air capabilities more widely and is part of the broader effort to mature key technologies, operational concepts, and capabilities for future combat air systems, including Tempest/GCAP.
The recent first flight represents VERY welcome progress for ECRS.Mk 2 and Typhoon, though there is still a way to go before the radar enters service, and there is little room for complacency.
