It is tempting sometimes to view the expansion of a range of products as somehow inevitable. If one system or capability works well and proves popular with customers, it often appears to naturally follow that a bigger and better version will be coming off the production line in short order. But innovation does not occur in a vacuum.
Take Leonardo’s family of airborne radar systems. The Osprey 50, which has begun its flight-test program and is being integrated into TacSAR – a pod developed in partnership with Collins Aerospace, combining the radar with the MS-110 long-range multispectral sensor – is a larger version of the Osprey 30 AESA, in service with 12 customers. Both systems are related to the smaller Seaspray radars, and the technologies integrated into the different products are aligned with and derive from similar sources and approaches. But the reasons for developing the Osprey 50 are complicated and several, and rely on the interplay of commercial and operational factors, as well as on long-term involvement and investment from three different British companies.
“For Osprey, we set our variants from what we thought would be needed in terms of capability, modes, range, etc.,” says Wayne Smith, head of radar campaigns at Leonardo’s Edinburgh facility. “But we obviously looked at target platforms, in terms of what size, weight and power limits they had. As we were developing the Osprey 50 we had good customer engagements [regarding] various ISR platforms, and also with Collins Aerospace with TacSAR.”
“We also had some read-across to the historical sales of the Seaspray range,” adds Smith’s colleague, radar operational capability manager Stan Hargreaves. “We purposely tried to make the power apertures similar to existing products that had already been successful in that competitive market. The Osprey 30 equates to the same kind of power aperture as the Seaspray 5000, and the Osprey 50 to the Seaspray 7500. So we’d already got a business case for the market, and had been successful in those particular areas.”
The roots of the TacSAR collaboration predate the merger that created Collins Aerospace. The precursor division – then United Technologies Airborne Systems’ office in Malvern, UK – was exploring possible technology tie-ups with Leonardo in 2018: that summer, ShowNews joined representatives of both companies for a demonstration during the Farnborough Airshow on board a flying testbed owned and operated by a third British firm, 2Excel Aviation.
“We were looking at working with [the Malvern team] to exploit our inventory,” Hargreaves says. “It wasn’t directly about TacSAR at that time: that was more looking at their SCI-Toolset product, which exploits our output.”
The two companies continue to collaborate with 2Excel’s Leading Edge division on flight testing. The TacSAR system has been flown inside 2Excel’s in-house LEAP-R (Leading Edge Applications Pod – Radar) pod, on a King Air platform. Flights have been taking place from Doncaster. (2Excel has also been contracted by Leonardo to provide a Boeing 757-based flying testbed for their work on the Tempest future fighter program.)
“We’ve got a long-term contract with 2Excel for our demonstration and trials, which is great,” Smith says. “For projects like this, as you can imagine, with trials flying there are changes to plan and things to work around. And 2Excel are really flexible, and really look after us in that respect.”
Although TacSAR’s development is not yet complete, Leonardo and Collins are already discussing the capability with potential customers – conversations that should continue at the airshow, coronavirus concerns permitting. Smith argues that the breadth of his firm’s portfolio of radars – and the relative ease with which they can be fitted as upgrades to older radars on in-service platforms – is particularly well suited to regional requirements.
“The region has such a large ISR requirement, particularly in the maritime environment,” he says. “We’re putting a lot of radars onto retrofits of current fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, as well as brand-new shiny programs. We have a well-proven capability that’s matured through Seaspray and Osprey 30 particularly. It has a bunch of customers. We have lots of different install options. It’s low SWaP. There’s not a strong environmental requirement for the aircraft, and it should integrate across a lot of mission systems.”
