Consideration of reliability and life-cycle costs for future airborne radars

The reliability and maintainability requirements for future airborne radar systems have not yet been fully quantified, but there is recognition of the need for significant improvements in dependability and availability with respect to current norms. Emerging requirements call for greatly enhanced dependability and availability together with significantly lower life-cycle costs. Ideally, following acquisition and installation of a radar, the baseline expectation is that it will function so reliably as to not have any noticeable impact on mission success, and that the needs/costs of support and maintenance over its lifetime will be minimal. Furthermore, it is expected that this should be achieved without incurring significantly higher acquisition costs or compromising functionality or performance. In response, we propose that airborne radars based on active electronically scanned antennas (AESA) can meet this challenge.