Raytheon Company and the U.S. Navy conducted the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for the new Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR), confirming system development is on track for delivery to the designated ship classes. The PDR followed several EASR milestones completed as planned on the development schedule, including the combined systems requirements and system functional reviews and the integrated baseline review.

EASR is the U.S. Navy's advanced radar for aircraft carriers and amphibious warfare ships, providing simultaneous anti-air warfare, anti-surface warfare and air traffic control mission capabilities. It delivers increased performance, higher reliability and sustainability and lower total ownership cost than the radars it replaces. EASR is the replacement for the Volume Search Radar for the CVN 78 class, and the AN/SPS-48 and AN/SPS-49 radar systems for numerous ship classes.

"Each EASR development milestone brings us closer to providing this needed mission capability to our sailors and marines deployed on aircraft carriers and amphibious ships," said U.S. Navy Capt. Seiko Okano, major program manager for Above Water Sensors, Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems. "As the PDR confirmed, the technical and design maturity of this advanced radar is right where it should be."

The PDR validated Raytheon's scaled design leveraging the AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), configured into a rotating and a fixed face variant to match the missions of the multiple ship classes. EASR is built on radar modular assembly (RMA) technology, which has been matured through development and recent test successes of the AN/SPY-6 for the DDG 51 Flight III destroyers. Each RMA is a self-contained radar in a 2 ft x 2 ft x 2 ft box. These individual radars can integrate together to form arrays of various sizes.

The commonality in both hardware and software with SPY-6 offers a host of advantages, including performance, availability and reliability; maintenance, training, logistics and lifecycle support. Following the progress and performance successes of AN/SPY-6, both radars continue to demonstrate their capabilities to meet mission needs, the maturity of the technology and the inherent innovation and flexibility of the design.