Navy P-8A Poseidon Already Being Redesigned
By David A. Fulghum 
SEATTLE Even though its first flight still isn’t slated until the second quarter of this year, the U.S. Navy’s P-8A Poseidon is already being redesigned.
Poseidon’s Increment One is the basic aircraft. However, the Navy has designed a software baseline that can be upgraded every 2-3 years. To support these serial upgrades, the aircraft has 50 percent extra electrical, cooling and computing power. There also is room for 12 tons of growth.
Following first flight, three aircraft will be in the flight test program which will last through 2011, service officials confirm. The first operational unit is to be on the ramp in 2013.
Increment Two has an anti-submarine warfare upgrade. At milestone C, the program will demonstrate a network-ready capability to publish and subscribe data that can be pushed to a tactical control station. And there are hints about what might be in store technologically and operationally for future increments. A key decision will be a follow-on to the P-3C’s mechanically-scanned, Littoral Surveillance Radar System (LSRS).
“We don’t know yet what will follow,” says Capt. Mike Moran, the Navy’s program manager for P-8 and EP-X. “We have been tasked to put provisions in the P-8 to host the next generation of LSRS. I don’t know if it will be an AESA [active, electronically scanned array radar], but I do know the P-8 has the necessary weight, capacity, power [180KVA plus 27,000 pounds of engine thrust] and cooling [for AESA, which can triple radar range over conventional radars].”
While the follow-on radar won’t have cruise missile detection capability, it has the proper frequency and antenna size for the mission if the proper software is developed. There also is Navy interest in non-explosive weapons.
“Non-kinetic weapons are not part of the baseline requirement, but the P-8 has a digital weapons bus and a weapons bay that is the size of [that in] the Joint Strike Fighter [for which the Navy’s aerial weapons are designed] and can carry the J-series weapons,” Moran says.
P-8A prime Boeing’s future concepts organization has already designed a re-usable high-power microwave (HPM) package that fits in the weapons bay of an F-35 or N-UCAS. Moreover, the Air Armaments Center at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., is developing HPM warheads that fit the shape of current air-dropped weapons such as Joint Direct Attack Munition and cruise missiles.
The Air Force also has accepted delivery of Raytheon’s first Miniature Air Launched Decoy, which in its J or jamming variant, “in concert with other electronic warfare assets [will] shape the electronic warfare battlespace,” according to an Air Force document. The idea is that a small HPM device would be affixed to the 300-pound MALD, which then flies very close to an enemy emitter, such as a radar antenna, and is triggered to produce a momentary spike of energy that can erase computer memory or damage electronic components.
Photo: Boeing
