Light Attack Gathers Steam

For the Hawker Beechcraft/Lockheed Martin AT-6 light attack aircraft team, the mantra is to produce the right weapon effects.

“If you are talking about counterinsurgency target sets, you want to be able to pick the right weapon and precisely place it where and when it needs to be there,” says Dan Hinson, AT-6 demonstration and test manager and chief test pilot for the team. “That requires persistence and network-centric command and control.”

The team is competing against Embraer with the Super Tucano to supply 20 Light Support Aircraft to Afghanistan and potentially 15 aircraft to the U.S. Air Force for use in training foreign air forces.

For more endurance, the team is looking at ways to add fuel without diminishing capability.

“We are working on putting 325 pounds of extra internal fuel in the wings, which would give another 45 minutes to an hour of flight,” Hinson says. “I flew four to six hours and still had 400 pounds of gas. That was with the EO/IR [electro-optic/infrared] turret and external fuel tanks, but not weapons.

“If the mission is ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], we can stand out there a long time,” Hinson continues. “Five hours is very doable and four is a pretty good standard. Being able to hang out in the battle with the same guys on station without having to cycle out for inflight refueling provides an amazing [amount of continuity] for an airborne mission.”

Another imperative for the AT-6 program is to leverage prior Defense Department investments in people, programs, logistics, platforms and training systems.

“We’ve taken the EO/IR sensor capability out of the MC-12W ISR aircraft, and we have integrated all of those capabilities,” Hinson says. “That means the Defense Department is familiar with every part we’re putting on the aircraft.”

For actual combat use, the AT-6 is considered to be in the right altitude band to give the best trade-off between avoiding threats while staying close enough to the fight to conduct precision targeting.

“We’re networked into the land battle with the A-10s and F-16s,” says Derek Hess, Hawker Beechcraft’s director of light attack programs. “We will have the ability to exchange still images, nine-line messages and streaming video as well as the flexibility of a helmet-mounted cuing system.”

“Right now the focus on the interaction of this aircraft and its capabilities [is being explored in] training missions that include joint terminal attack controller training, intelligence processing, exploitation and dissemination training while serving as a surrogate [unmanned aerial system] platform for U.S. peacetime training missions,” Hinson says. “The mission set lends itself to homeland defense and security missions like border and port security, counter-narcoterrorism, maritime patrol, disaster area imagery or search and rescue.”

Several key pieces are receiving particularly intense scrutiny, including the defensive survival equipment (missile warning and countermeasures systems) and the Scorpion helmet-mounted cueing system (HMCS).

“When you tie it into a network-centric weapons-delivery platform, the package becomes a significant force multiplier,” Hinson says. “When you talk about having Forward Air Controller-Airborne [capabilities] in both [front and rear] cockpits, it is huge. We are A-10-centric, so a second cockpit is something that continues the evolution of capabilities as new tactics, techniques and procedures emerge.”