A case for flight line testing of EW suites meeting the war fighter's need "a strike mission situational awareness issue"

Abstract

The Electronic Warfare Operational Advisory Group (EW, OAG) presented {again, this year} that a significant need has arisen from the war-fighter and user community to test and confirm the various EW systems in our operational platforms in a quick, efficient and cost effective manor. There are at least eleven (11) discrete threats identified which are 100% lethal against US tactical aircraft. Situational awareness on-board tactical aircraft is essential to our war-fighters' survival. We base this situational awareness on Radar Warning Receivers detecting and alerting the pilot of lethal threats in time to react to them, as well as an active jammer capability towards these and other threat signals. We have observed in numerous years of experience, with the current fleet of tactical aircraft, many tens of thousands of maintenance actions related to EW systems. The data on these actions reveal a multitude of system failures that went initially undetected or misdiagnosed. The result is at least unknown to the pilot that he has a reduced EW capability, in terms of range or as basic as actual functionality of these systems. This places the war-fighter at extreme risk for he expects these systems to perform when they, in fad, may not. It is easy to see the critical nature of this need of this surety. A flight line test concept would verify the systems effectiveness or at least its functionality. Functionality that escaped the system's or a subsystem's ability to detect through BIT. The continued experiences of inadequate BIT testing, both in the new systems but, more importantly, in the existing legacy systems is reality. These elements, in fact, are where the greatest occurrence of failures in the system performance and yet we have no method of detecting them on a real time, nonintrusive way. Mission accomplishment is placed at risk and lives in jeopardy.