Jane Edwards
Raytheon Technologies hopes to replicate the at-sea trial results of the first version of its SPY-6 radar with other variants of the Air and Missile Defense Radar system once it begins at-sea tests later this year, Defense News reported Monday.
SPY-6 V1, which comes with four large radar faces, was integrated with the U.S. Navy’s Jack H. Lucas Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer (DDG 125) and the Lockheed Martin-built Aegis Combat System and was tested for the first time in December as part of a series of at-sea tests following the departure of the vessel from the shipyard of HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding division in Mississippi.
“Coming out of those trials, we really hit a home run with the performance of the radar out at sea, which the Navy is very, very excited about — to the point that they ended up ending the trials a day early because all the objectives were met early,” Mike Mills, SPY-6 program director for Raytheon Missiles & Defense, told the publication.
Mills said the Raytheon team discovered a couple of software issues during the alpha trials and will work to address them before the next phase of SPY-6 V1 at-sea trials and V2 and V3 radar testing kick off later in 2023 and 2024.
He noted that the SPY-6 V2 radar is already installed on the USS Richard M. McCool Jr. amphibious transport dock and is expected to enter the first at-sea testing in the late summer.
The SPY-6 V3 radar installed on the future aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy is set to be activated in the late summer or early fall in preparation for at-sea trials and delivery to the Navy in 2024, according to Mills.
In March 2022, Raytheon received a potential $3.2 billion contract to produce SPY-6 hardware in rotating, solid-state and fixed-face variants for installation on naval ships.
