The crew of the F/A-18 Super Hornet carrying the Navy’s Infrared Search and Track (IRST) pod at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. (Photo co...
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The crew of the F/A-18 Super Hornet carrying the Navy’s Infrared Search and Track (IRST) pod at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. (Photo courtesy of Lockheed Martin) |
The IRST, provides the F/A-18 an alternate air-to-air targeting system in a high-threat electronic-attack environment.
The ‘see first, strike first’ long-range IRST21 sensor uses infrared search and track technology to detect, track and enable the Super Hornet to engage threats with air-to-air weapons.
The passive IRST sensor searches and detects heat sources, simultaneously track multiple targets and provide a highly effective air-to-air targeting capability, even when encountering advanced threats equipped with radar-jamming technology.
Unlike current radar systems, IRST does not give off radiation and is harder to detect, giving superior first-see, first-shoot advantage to pilot against enemy aircraft.
The IRST system consists of Lockheed Martin’s IRST21™ sensor, the GE Aviation FPU-13 Fuel Tank Assembly and the Meggitt Defense Industry Environmental Control unit. The system demonstrated its production readiness through a series of extensive assessments and reviews, including flight tests.
In addition to detecting airborne threats, IRST significantly enhances multiple target resolution compared to radar, providing greater discrimination of threat formations at longer ranges.
Data from the IRST21 sensor is fused with other on-board F/A-18 sensor data to provide maximum situational awareness to the warfighter. On the F/A-18E/F, IRST21 is mounted on the nose section of the centerline fuel tank.
IRST21 is the next generation of Lockheed Martin’s legacy IRST sensor system, which accumulated more than 300,000 flight hours on the U.S. Navy’s F-14 and international F-15 platforms.
The system was developed under a $135 million contract awarded to Lockheed Martin and is expected to deploy on the F/A-18 Super Hornet in 2017.
