Six Cobham Aviation Services UK aircraft supported by a team of around 30 crew, engineers and operational staff recently took part in Exercise Joint Warrior.
The exercise is NATO’s two-week, multinational training exercise led by Joint Tactical Exercise Planning Staff from the United Kingdom.
The company say that five Falcon Jets and one DA42 were deployed to Prestwick to deliver a range of operational readiness training activities including electronic warfare (EW), threat simulation, target towing and UAV simulation.
“Working in conjunction with 736 Naval Air Squadron, four Falcons flew alongside Hawk aircraft disguised as missiles during a succession of EW and threat simulation tasks to test the tactics, techniques and procedures of various British and foreign military ships. A series of live firing tests were also supported by another Falcon fitted with target towing capability.
Whilst the Falcons remained in Scotland for the duration, our DA42 aircraft, tasked with simulating UAV activity (flying low and slow with full motion video capability) made its way down to Cornwall during an amphibious warfare exercise.”
The Ministry of Defence say that Exercise Joint Warrior is intended to provide forces with a variety of joint training scenarios that explore real world challenges.
ps from the article about our new Defence Minister(Ministress?)-are we allowed to say that Penny Mordaunt is pretty or can we still get locked up for that sort thing?
Not locked up, just a loud groan of disappointment that you think the comment acceptable…thats the polite response!
Seriously Chris?? Amazing that an older man cannot politely compliment an attractive lady without being labelled a chauvinist or pervert or the like.. and to boot mildly in jest and in a self deprecating manner. Things have swung too far the other way and I am in many respects glad I am in the last phase of my life and not sorry to be leaving the world as it is surrounded by thought police and afraid to say boo, free speech curtailed in extremis..
On a scale of 1 to 2, i’d give her one!
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… I’ll get my coat.
I think Geoff Hoon is the best looking DS we’ve had so far
But Michael Hesaltine did have long flowing blonde locks – and the face of a constipated chimpanzee of course.
The MOD probably paid 2 billion for cobhams work.
Err no. Approx £40mil a year which makes it unbelievable value, and the reason ASDOT was cancelled is that no one can do it cheaper hence having to still use 50yr old Falcons.
It’s amazing to think that these commercial Falcon aircraft have the same jamming and EW capacity as the US Navy’s F18 Growlers. If we ever did get in a peer vs peer war, I wonder if we could requisition these aircraft? These aircraft would significantly increase the capability of a F35/Typhoon strike package.
They categorically do not have that capability.
They’re designed to simulate certain threats and provide a similar electronic warfare capability as those threats. But thats nowhere near the same job that an EA-18G undertakes. Offensive jamming support is a whole different ball game, and is one that the UK has never had.
We did actually have the perfect platform in the Tornado F.3 at the end of its career, but it would have needed additional investment. It could have been a fantastic SEAD/DEAD platform, arguably better than the Tornado ECR operated by Germany and Italy.
From what I’ve been told the majority of the hardware is already in place. I agree that the mission that Chobham undertake is test ships but also RAF air defences. The EW suite is Chobham’s own design and does the full range of EW jamming and spoofing but also to generate synthetic missile threats. It does this by using the transmitted pulse waveform from the ship with “basically” a time delay and then firing it back at the ship. This mimics an inbound missile threat. The aircraft’s systems has the capability of mimicking over twenty threats per frequency channel. The… Read more »
wrong place …