Northrop Grumman has begun incorporating software modes from the F-35 strike fighter’s APG-81 AESA radar into its Scaleable Agile Beam Radar design, said Dave Wallace, head of the company’s F-16 program development. Briefing reporters Monday at AFA’s Air & Space Conference at National Harbor, Md., Wallace said these modes “are proving very affordable, very stable, and in the future, what the APG-81 gets, [SABR] will too.” One example, he cited, is improved electronic protection offered by the APG-81’s software compared to SABR’s previous software. Northrop has been developing SABR on its own dime, seeing a promising market for F-16 operators who wish to upgrade their legacy F-16s with an advanced electronically scanned array radar system. The Air Force, for example, has expressed an interest in potentially fitting between 300 and 600 F-16s with an AESA. Wallace said SABR technology is at a level of maturity such that Northrop is “approaching a point where we believe that we could go in to a relatively short development … and then proceed with delivering a product.” That timeline, could be “probably less than two years” but would depend on the customer’s needs, he noted. Raytheon is also offering AESA options for the F-16.
Retired Col. Carlyle "Smitty" Harris, known for introducing the "tap code" by which American POWs in North Vietnam could surreptitiously communicate with one another, died July 6. Harris was brutalized by the North Vietnamese over almost eight years of captivity.