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Aviation History
1977
1977 - 0118.PDF
108 11 urn DEFENCE Northrop studies new air-to-air missile FEASIBILITY studies for an advanced medium - range air - to - air missile (AMRAAM) are being conducted by a US team headed by Northrop. Com bat experience in Vietnam, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent demonstrated the need for a new mis sile to arm the next generation of US Air Force and Navy fighters, so allow ing them to engage other fighters of comparable performance. The AMRAAM programme aims to pro duce an all weather weapon, smaller, lighter and cheaper than radar-guided types at present in service. Early last year Northrop was awarded an $869,000 contract to demonstrate the feasibility of an advanced radar-guided missile by theoretical studies, simulation and testing of key hardware components. The airframe, based partly on a Matra design proposed during the develop ment of the R.550 Magic, will house both mid-course and terminal guid ance. Before launch, the aircraft fire- control radar will feed target co ordinates to an inertial reference unit and microcomputer in the missile. These will guide the weapon suffi ciently close to the target for an active-radar seeker to steer the mis sile to impact, thus making AMRAAM a fire-and-forget system. Packaging such complex systems into a Magic-sized airframe is likely to be the most difficult aspect of the programme. The semi-active guided Sidewinder IB, developed to arm the Crusader and the only weapon of this size to use radar guidance, has been withdrawn from use, having proved less than successful in service. (But see story "Radar head for Sidewinder" on this page.) The radar seeker is being developed by the Government and Electronics division of Motorola, and other sub systems will be supplied by Northrop's Precision Products division at Nor wood, Mass. Radar head for Sidewinder THE 5in-diameter semi-active radar homing head developed by Marconi Space and Defence Systems and dis played for the first time at last year's Farnborough show (see Flight for Sep tember 18, 1976, page 886) is under stood to be on offer to Saudi Arabia as a means of upgrading the Side winder missiles in service with the RSiAF. The most obvious applica tion for the head, however, would be the 612in-diameter Hawker Siddeley SRAAM, any customer for which could operate a mixture of IR-homing and semi-active weapons with a com mon airframe, a technique favoured by both the Soviet and US air forces. A Sidewinder-compatible version could prove attractive to forces operating the US missile or its Russian equiva lent, the AA-2 Atoll, on radar-equipped aircraft such as the F-5E, Mirage III, F-l, MiG-21 or Phantom. Roll reference for beam-riders THREE Northrop engineers have patented a roll-reference attitude-con trol system for optical beam-riding projectiles and missiles. A beam of polarised light from a ground trans mitter illuminates a beam-splitter aligned with the vertical axis of the missile. The beam's energy is split to obtain vertical and horizontal output voltages, the ratio of which provides a measurement of the missile's attitude in the roll axis. Inventors Frank S. Coxe, Lyle A. Maxey and David P. Wahl are employed by Northrop's Electro mechanical Division at Anaheim, Calif. Japan: F-X delay confirmed . . . THE JAPANESE National Defence Council, chaired by outgoing Prime Minister Takeo Miki, has decided to postpone for one year the final deci sion on whether to buy McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagles (see Flight for December 25, 1976, page 1832). Con firmation of the delay in the F-X pro gramme came after vice-ministers of the finance ministry and the Defence Agency agreed that it would be "in appropriate" in the current political situation to try to force through the national Diet an appropriation for the F-15s. The Defence Agency had earlier planned to introduce 29 F-15s between 1979 and 1981, inoluding 15 which would have been assembled in Japan. With spares and related equipment, however, these aircraft would have This full-scale mock-up of the Dassault Mirag >. Delta 2000 has been built at St Cloud and clearly shows the new wing/fuselage junction compared with the Mirage III design (see Flight for December 25, page 1832) FLIGHT International, IS January 1977 cost an estimated 9 billion yen each, or about £18 million, taking an un stated amount of inflation into con sideration. It is not clear whether this price includes US R&D cost recovery, the level of which has consistently been reported as unsettled. . . . and AEW reduction too? A REDUCTION from 15 to five in the number of airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft initially deployed by the Air Self-Defence Forces is being considered by the Japanese Defence Agency. The reason is that the $600 million-plus cost of 15 aircraft would be too great a burden to bear at the same time as the $4 billion F-X fighter programme. The JASDF estimates that it needs to deploy five AEW aircraft at each of three air bases in order to main tain 24hr coverage of Japanese territory. The Defence Agency is now proposing that a first batch of five should be deployed in the most critical sector to begin with. Money for these will be requested in the 1978 defence budget. Both the Boeing E-3A and Grumman E-2C are reported as being still in the running for the order, although the preference is felt to lie with the cheaper E-2C Hawkeye. HPT-32 trainer makes first flight THE MAIDEN flight of the Hindustan Aeronautics HPT-32 primary trainer took place on January 6 (see Flight last week, page 51, for a photograph of the type in final assembly). Pilot for the occasion was Wg Cdr I. M. Chopra, company chief test pilot. Take-off weight was 1,325kg and the flight, from HAL's Bangalore plant, lasted 31min, the aircraft reaching a maximum altitude of 7,000ft. The flight is reported to have been fully satisfactory. US upgrades Titan II force STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND plans to retrofit the Titan II ICBM force with the Universal Space Guidance System (USGS) currently fitted to the Titan III satellite launcher. The exist ing guidance system is becoming diffi cult to maintain now that certain logic modules in the missile computers are dill i
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