Nickel01
05-08-05, 20:41
Non solo il B-52 continua e continuerà a volare, ma lo vogliono anche aggiornare!!
The U.S. Air Force has begun thinking about possibly buying a new radar to help sustain the venerable B-52H Stratofortress bomber for decades to come.
Chief Master Sgt. Timothy Finch, who leads a team at Langley Air Force Base, Va., that works on various B-52 modernization and sustainment programs, said he hopes that the Air Force will approve a funding request to conduct a formal study on a potential radar program. The money likely would come from the Air Force's fiscal 2007 budget request, which the Bush Administration is expected to send to Congress in about six months.
Finch said the study, which would probably take a year or two to complete, would confirm whether a new radar is needed. It also would explore what a new radar should be capable of doing and help determine when would be a good time to buy it.
The existing radar, the APQ-166 Strategic Radar, is used to find ground targets, monitor weather and conduct navigation. The radar was developed in the late 1970s by Norden, now part of Northrop Grumman, and has been fielded on the B-52 for more than two decades.
Obsolete parts and reliability problems already are starting to become issues for the existing radar, and the Air Force's 94 B-52s, which are about 45 years old on average, are scheduled to remain in service for another 35 years. While the obsolescence and reliability issues "are all manageable at this point, given the fact that the aircraft is slated to be in the inventory till 2040, we obviously realize that you're not going to get there from here with a 25-year-old radar," Finch told The DAILY in a recent interview.
Advances eyed
Thanks to technological advances over the past two decades, it is believed that a new radar could provide sizable improvements in accuracy and reliability over the APQ-166. Finch said the ability to look at something on the ground could be improved about 20- to 30-fold and that the time between failures could be increased "by many fold" from the current level of tens of hours.
"We'd like to think we could find something that would operate [without failure] into the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours," he said. "That may be a little much."
Finch suspects that upgrading the existing radar, including its mechanical antenna, would not be cost-effective.
"I believe, given the age of the system, and that old mechanical antenna, chances are it would be much more economical to replace the system as [opposed to] trying to add on to it," he said.
Aviation Week, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies.
The U.S. Air Force has begun thinking about possibly buying a new radar to help sustain the venerable B-52H Stratofortress bomber for decades to come.
Chief Master Sgt. Timothy Finch, who leads a team at Langley Air Force Base, Va., that works on various B-52 modernization and sustainment programs, said he hopes that the Air Force will approve a funding request to conduct a formal study on a potential radar program. The money likely would come from the Air Force's fiscal 2007 budget request, which the Bush Administration is expected to send to Congress in about six months.
Finch said the study, which would probably take a year or two to complete, would confirm whether a new radar is needed. It also would explore what a new radar should be capable of doing and help determine when would be a good time to buy it.
The existing radar, the APQ-166 Strategic Radar, is used to find ground targets, monitor weather and conduct navigation. The radar was developed in the late 1970s by Norden, now part of Northrop Grumman, and has been fielded on the B-52 for more than two decades.
Obsolete parts and reliability problems already are starting to become issues for the existing radar, and the Air Force's 94 B-52s, which are about 45 years old on average, are scheduled to remain in service for another 35 years. While the obsolescence and reliability issues "are all manageable at this point, given the fact that the aircraft is slated to be in the inventory till 2040, we obviously realize that you're not going to get there from here with a 25-year-old radar," Finch told The DAILY in a recent interview.
Advances eyed
Thanks to technological advances over the past two decades, it is believed that a new radar could provide sizable improvements in accuracy and reliability over the APQ-166. Finch said the ability to look at something on the ground could be improved about 20- to 30-fold and that the time between failures could be increased "by many fold" from the current level of tens of hours.
"We'd like to think we could find something that would operate [without failure] into the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours," he said. "That may be a little much."
Finch suspects that upgrading the existing radar, including its mechanical antenna, would not be cost-effective.
"I believe, given the age of the system, and that old mechanical antenna, chances are it would be much more economical to replace the system as [opposed to] trying to add on to it," he said.
Aviation Week, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies.