Newsday.com

Navy gets first "Growler" with Northrop Grumman radar jammer

BY JAMES BERNSTEIN

 

james.bernstein@newsday.com

 

3:09 PM EDT, June 2, 2008

 

The Growlers are coming.

 

 

The EA-18G Growler, that is. The EA-18G is a new electronic attack airplane, and the first of them is to be delivered to the Navy Tuesday at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state.

 

Northrop Grumman's facility in Bethpage is a major contributor to the Growler, whose airframe is made by Boeing Co.

 

Northrop Grumman engineers and technicians in Bethpage designed an advanced system -- called ICAP III, for improved capability -- that will aid the EA-18G in jamming radars of enemy aircraft. Northrop Grumman had opened a new laboratory in Bethpage to design the ICAP III system, considered the most advanced jammer in the world.

 

The lab employes about 80 of Northrop Grumman's approximately 2,000 Long Island workers. Company officials weren't available for comment.

 

The Navy is to make a bit of a fuss over delivery of the first of what are expected to be 85 Growlers that will be built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Navy Secretary Donald C. Winter, top Northrop Grumman and Boeing executives, along with some members of the local Washington congressional delegation, are expected to be on hand for a brief ceremony welcoming the Growler that was flown there.

 

The EA-18G is to eventually replace the EA-6B Prowler, which was built by the former Grumman Corp. in Bethpage and Calverton in the 1970s and '80s. The Growler's radar-jamming capabilities are said to be far superior to the Prowlers.

 

Current Prowlers jam enemy radar by transmitting electronic signals over broad frequency banks to "blind" hostile planes. The Growler, however, uses more sophisticated receivers and software to more rapidly locate enemy radars and focus its jamming energy on the threat.

 

The Growler is an electronic version of the Navy's F/A-18F Super Hornet, which was originally built by McDonnell Douglas Corp. McDonnell Douglas was acquired years ago by Boeing.

 

Meanwhile, Boeing is in a bitter dogfight with Northrop Grumman over which company will build a new tanker aircraft for the Air Force under an eye-popping $40 billion contract.

 

The Air Force awarded the contract to Northrop Grumman, stunning the military contracting industry, which had widely expected Boeing to win, since it has been building tankers for decades. Boeing has protested the Air Force decision to the Government Accounting Office, which is to make a decision about the deal this month.

 

Find Newsday article here.

 

[Me] One of the final vestiges of a once all-powerful Long Island military, predominantly naval, aviation industry.

The DEW Line Blog

 

Growler Day

by Stephen Trimble

 

A Boeing bus will transport me and other journalists this morning from a plush hotel in downtown Seattle to Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. In a drizzly ceremony, we will witness Secretary of the Navy Don Winter accept the delivery of the first EA-18G Growler to the USN's fleet readiness squadron.

 

This would be a fairly routine affair except for a couple of very distinguishing facts: first, the event is occurring exactly according to the original schedule and, second, Boeing's five-year-old development program is not over-budget.

 

It'd be nice to think those two facts weren't so extraordinary, but, in the world of military acquisition, it is.

 

To be sure, there remain a few caveats. The operational test phase begins in September, which will expose any unresolved design or technology glitches. The Government Accountability Office reported in March that a few software issues need to be fixed before operational tests can be performed. We'll see how that pans out, but none of the issues sound like show-stoppers.

 

Some of the more cynical observers (blush) might also say that Boeing and the Navy cheated with the EA-18G.

 

This is not the same as starting a new weapon project from scratch. The airframe for the EA-18G is based on the design of the already proven F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the electronic warfare package is based largely on the ICAP III suite already flying on the EA-6B Prowler. The ALQ-99 jammer is merely a decade-old, upgraded version of a pod that first flew in 1971 (and needs to be retired as threats evolve over the next decade).

 

But it's also not fair to Boeing to dismiss the complexity of this project. Repackaging the ICAP III to fit inside the Growler involved no small risk. The "football" ALQ-218 receiver mounted on the EA-6B's tail was split into two pieces and installed in the more aerodynamically harsh environment of the EA-18G's wingtips. I'm still curious how they managed to pull off the ALQ-218's radome, which must be sturdy enough to survive on the wingtip, yet not too sturdy to interfere with the operations of the embedded antenna.

 

Integrating the all-new Raytheon-made Communications Countermeasures Set (CCS) also added some complexity to the project, as did the introduction of the highly useful interference cancellation system (INCANS), which allows the EA-18G to continue jamming an enemy radar even while the pilot continues to communicate with other friendly aircraft.

 

It's reasonable to question whether the navy should have been still more ambitious. Why not introduce an all-new, digital-era jamming pod with the first delivery of the EA-18G? Why not design a next-generation jammer aircraft around a more stealthy platform, like the navy's forthcoming F-35C due to be delivered in 2015? Why not challenge your contractor -- to which you're paying billions of dollars -- to invent something completely new, versus "repackaging" two familiar systems?

 

At the end of the day, the navy is getting exactly what it paid for, on-time. In this day and age, maybe that's all you can really ask for.