Boeing E-7 Wedgetail (RAF)

[Mercator]

Boeing provided an extended PR piece in Breaking Defence. The usual sort of gumph, but a nugget worth mentioning:

“We see tremendous opportunities to begin test and evaluation, given that we’re buying a system very similar to the U.K. E-7. Much of the testing can actually be done on a U.K. E-7 or a Wedgetail, so tremendous opportunities, especially with test and evaluation.” – Steven Wert, Program Executive Officer Digital, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Air Force PEO Looks to Speed Up Program Start, Testing for Wedgetail, Aug. 11, 2022.

https://breakingdefense.com/2023/03/rea ... um=twitter

[Mercator]

Decent article. A lot of, "it's classified", but reasonable.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/t ... capable-of

[Clive F]

Good job we didn't spend loads of money updating our E3's!

[NickC]

Always did wonder about the survivability of large commercial aircraft like the 737/ E-7 flying at 35,000 ft as thought would be meat and drink to long range AA missile systems like S-300 / S-400 and the 600kg Vympel R-37 AAM, assume E-7 must be fitted with classified sophisticated soft kill EW systems and decoys.

The E-7 Northrop Grumman’s Multirole Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) radar, AESA & L-band, developed around the turn of the century for the cancelled E-10 MC2A, a generation ahead of the mechanically scanned AN/APY-1/2 radars used in the E-3.

L-band long waveband radar comes with fairly low discrimination though better able at picking up LO stealth aircraft, the USN funding on a low scale a possible future E-3 replacement radar the North Star High-Gain UESA, an AESA radar with a two band antenna, UHF and S-band antennas with dual polarization, the UHF-band 400 -1 GHz with a 2D filtering imaging technique called space-time adaptive processing to provides early warning detection of low flying stealth aircraft against dense background clutter both over land and sea, targets detected by the UHF-band then cue the shorter wavelength S-band 2.3-3.7 GHz antenna to provide a more precise targeting at long range. Disadvantages is that dual band radars can be subject to mutual interference.

[bobp]

New spending on facility for E7.....

https://www.forces.net/services/raf/raf ... e-aircraft

[bobp]

Good article on the E7 and why the US would like to get them ASAP

https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/03 ... t-the-e-7/

[NickC]

Always did wonder about the survivability of large commercial aircraft like the 737/ E-7 flying at 35,000 ft as thought would be meat and drink to long range AA missile systems like S-300 / S-400 and the 600kg Vympel R-37 AAM, assume E-7 must be fitted with classified sophisticated soft kill EW systems and decoys.

@ bobp post thanks for ref, from the write up it appears the USAF $1.2 billion E-7A development funding previously mentioned will partially fund an update to E-7 ESM/EW suite taken from EC-37B Compass Call, F-35 and F-15EX fighters. (The new USAF EC-37B Compass Call EW aircraft will be based on the Gulfstream G550, Conformal Airborne Early Warning Aircraft (CAEW) airframe, which uses BAE Inc N.H. EW next gen SABER tech, transitioning from hardware to software defined hardware as used in the previous gen EC-130H Compass Call and Lockheed also funded BAE Inc with half a billion$ Dec'21 to update the F-35's AN/ASQ-239 high-performance EW mission system.)

Has the RAF the equivalent ESM signals analysis to locate the air defenses and the EW attack capability a/c as the USAF EC-37B or the USN EC-18G Growler's to allow coordinated attacks with anti-radiation missiles eg SPEAR EW), to suppress integrated air defence systems

https://www.baesystems.com/en-uk/articl ... ll-upgrade