Boeing’s Next-Gen Super Hornet Will Be (Sort Of) Stealthy
22 Mar 2018 Lara Seligman
"...Gillian [Dan Gillian, Boeing F/A-18 and EA-18 program manager] confirms that an improved low-observable (LO) coating will be one of five key characteristics of the Block III Super Hornet. The fighter is already “a very stealth airplane today”—he says, declining to elaborate—but there are new coatings engineers can apply on different surfaces of the aircraft to make it even more survivable, he says.
The F/A-18 was not designed specifically to be stealthy and lacks many of the fundamental stealth characteristics baked into Lockheed Martin’s F-35 and F-22 airframes. But there are other ways to enhance stealth, such as adding LO coating and radar-absorbent material improvements in certain locations on the airframe. A few simple changes “can buy us just a little bit of performance that’s low-cost and easy to go do,” Gillian says.
The souped-up aircraft the Navy has agreed to buy looks very different from Boeing’s original 2013 proposal for an “Advanced Super Hornet,” which focused on stealth. Boeing engineers found they needed to make design compromises to significantly reduce the aircraft’s radar cross section—for instance, by restricting payload, Gillian told Aviation Week in 2017. This drove Boeing to drop certain features of the 2013 proposal, such as an enclosed weapons pod and internal infrared search-and-track (IRST) sensor, from the newest package.
The Navy will begin procuring the Block III Super Hornet in fiscal 2019 with a 24-aircraft buy, the first of which will come off the production line in 2020. Over the next five years, the Navy proposes buying 110 additional Super Hornets, including a three-year procurement, which is a significant boost from last year’s budget request. Meanwhile, the Navy will accelerate divestiture of the legacy Hornets, with the last active component squadron transitioning to the Super Hornet in 2018. The service plans to send the last F/A-18 A-D to the boneyard no later than the fiscal 2030 timeframe.
Boeing aims to deliver one Block III squadron per carrier air wing by 2024 and two squadrons of Block IIIs per carrier air wing by 2027, Gillian says. Boeing will achieve this goal both by building new Super Hornets and by upgrading the older Block II aircraft to the Block III configuration i -depot. Boeing intends to start service life modification (SLM) work on the Block II aircraft in St. Louis in April.
The SLM’s initial focus will be extending airframe life to 9,000 hr. from 6,000, Gillian says. Later, SLM will incorporate efforts to make the aircraft more “maintainable”—for example, grooming wire, fixing corrosion and replacing ducts. Boeing is also working with the Navy on a “reset” of the Super Hornet’s environmental control system following a spike in hypoxia-like physiological episodes in the fleet.
SLM will expand to include the full Block II-to-Block III conversion in the early 2020s, Gillian says. This means LO improvements; an advanced cockpit system with a large-area display for improved user interface, a more powerful computer called the distributed targeting processor network, a bigger data pipe for passing information called Tactical Targeting Network Technology and conformal fuel tanks (CFT).
The CFTs will extend the range of the aircraft by 100-120 nm. They are designed to replace the extra fuel tanks the Super Hornet currently slings under its wings, reducing weight and drag and enabling additional payload....
...Finally, the Block III upgrade also will include a long-range IRST sensor that will allow the Super Hornet to detect and track advanced threats from a distance...."
