Just saw this little clip, this strikes me as being incredibly too good to be true. I love the little jab at the eurofighter where it gets splashed by OPFPOR while the F-35 WTFPWNS in the same simulated engagement.

DAS propaganda video

What was that Aircraft ID function they mention, and how the heck does it work?

F-22 seems more performance oriented while the JSF seems to be systems oriented... I wonder how difficult it would be to integrate helmet mounted displays, DAS, and EOTS to the F-22

I am sure it is possible and would probably not cost too much compared to other major aircraft upgrades.

Of course we are building so relatively few F-22As I doubt they would get the funding for such an upgrade.
Perhaps if somebody manages to resurrect the Raptor down the road as the F-22B.

Helmet mounted display is doable, but DAS and EOTS won't fit as I understand it. Cameras are too big.



GIven that the F-22s have already gone on upgrades costing a hundred million per plane apparently I doubt it could be done for "not too much."

How the hell? The F-22 is pretty huge compared to the F-35.

Far less than another F-35 would cost, and it would add a similar attack capability that is one of the reason Gates and others seem to hate the F-22A.

I think it's like what was mentioned in Day of the Cheetah, multicoloured canopy/display/whatever. ISTU that the bad guys and good guy aircraft have different colours (e.g., yellow or blue for good guys, red for baddies) indicated on the HUD or the pilot's HMS/HMD. Probably tie it in with IFF.

If a human being can identify an aircraft by its appearance, why shouldn't this system be able to do so?

The video is most excellent aerospace porn.

But it's calling into play things that I've only read about in science fiction. HEck, even some of the japanese animation studios have come up with some of this stuff. One of the Technical Manuals for the Macross series showed imagery projected on the interior of the cockpit of the aircraft to basically cue up what was what and where it was. Friendlies and foes. Then there's the sort of stuff you see in David Drake's hammers Slammers series with the helmets the tankers wear basically having small computers in them and links with their tanks and the other vehicles in the net. That allowed some serious communications and Situational awareness because the computer was properly filtering what was and was not important.

I guess as systems get more integrated and more sophisticated the ease of using the tools effectively will increase. Sort of like the difference between programing your computer with patch cords and punch cards vs having purpose built software to handle tasks. Same sort of thing with the avionics, targeting and IFF. Pretty nifty though.

Wait till you've got this in tanks.

The F-22 PO is apparently looking at adding DAS functionality to the AAR-56s. I think the principal problem with the idea of back fitting the AAQ-37 cameras is the “aperture canoe” behind the nose gear door on the F-22 is too small to accommodate the bigger cameras. What I found interesting is despite the video’s claims, LM officials have commented fairly recently that they don’t think DAS is much of a tactical advantage in a WVR fight.

EOTS is a whole different animal and would require the addition of a chin aperture like the F-35 has. I think this would be more of a fiscal than a technical hurdle as a lot of work was done for the AIRST early in the F-22 program which has a very similar aperture in the same location. IIRC they even went as far as pole testing the final configuration before dropping the AIRST entirely.




Not that much. The combined cost of the next two upgrades -- increment 3.1 and 3.2 -- is $8.3 billion. Most of that is R&D and as I recall the actual cost to upgrade each jet is around $10 million. What’s interesting is that the current upgrade path for the jet is heavily biased towards A-G. Here are the latest known upgrade spirals (as of Jun ’08):

Block 30 Increment 3.1: SAR modes (APG-77v1), self targeting for JDAM, SDB capability (Global Strike initial Enhanced)

Block 35 Increment 3.2: MALD, Enhanced SDB capability, multi-ship geo-location, AGCAS, AIM-9X, AIM-120D. (Global Strike Enhanced)

Block 35: Increment 3.3: (Unfunded presently) Mode 5/S transponder, additional automatic radar modes, GMTI

There’s some conflicting information on whether the SDB capability is in 3.1 or 3.2. Even more interesting is the still undefined increment 4 and 5 spirals which changes the type designation from F-22A to F-22C. Increment 4/5 will add the following:

Full spectrum Airborne Electronic Attack
Full spectrum C2 Battlespace awareness
Full spectrum Network-Centric warfare
Extended LO-Combat range
Advanced Weapons/Moving Target Attack

That it exists isn't the question Ken, how it works is.

It appeared to 'colour' aircraft according to being ID'd as friend or foe and display either in the helmet or on the canopy.
The question is could this potentially (as illustrated) diminish observation of certain elements of ACM?
Or does it simply draw a small box or triangle around the aircraft as you see the padlock system in most flight-sims do?

Does it work by projecting an image onto the canopy or is the canopy itself part of an active display?

Probably displays it on the helmet mounted hud, although with OLED technology coming right along we might see entire canopies becoming part of the display, which would provide much of the situational awareness benefit of a helmet mounted HUD but without all the weight on the pilot's head. All it would need would be a tracking system to see where the pilot's head was pointing which can be very light.

The limitation of such systems is that the pilot cannot look through the floor to see objects. The canopy as a display system is useful, but the best way I think, to get the best bang for the system is on the helmet mounted gear. There is of course a weight penalty, but being able to look through the airframe using the aircraft's combined sensor data (and presumably data from data linked wingmen AND AWACs) certainly would seem on face, to this armchair aviator, to have some significant use. There've been times I wish I could look through the hood or body of a vehicle I was driving and couldn't. I certainly wasn't flying a multi-million dollar aircraft in combat situations.

For canopy mounted systems, you'd need the helmet tracking to be VERY good otherwise you're going to get some nasty parallax issues.

Because the human brain, unlike the vast majority of computers in actual use today, is not a digital von Neumann machine. If artificial neural networks become practical, machine pattern recognition might approach human capabilities, but for now the combination of human eye and brain is much better than computer systems at recognizing objects.

It looks to me like DAS does not do recognition itself. What DAS does is to track the aircraft around the F-35 so that it can tell you that the aircraft coming up your tail is one that you earlier designated as friendly rather than one that you designated as an enemy. Notice that around 1:40 (the AAA artillery), the video talks about DAS cueing the mission computer which then uses EOS and AESA radar to identify the target.

Hojutsuka

It's called FCS.

The floor isn't a problem provided there's enough cameras, sensors and etc. are put in place to cover that side. The primary hurdle is the pilots will be able to see through themselves or their seats without use of a helmet HUD at minimum.

For ID, there should be some sort of IFF readout. Even for today's "video generation", the sheer volume of data to be processed will be monumental.