SELEX Galileo completes CDAS TDP milestone

SELEX Galileo has successfully completed the first significant development milestone on the Common Defensive Aids System Technology Demonstrator Programme (CDAS TDP).

CDAS TDP is an important contract placed by the UK MoD to support the aims of the UK strategy for Air Platform Protection. The TDP is led by SELEX Galileo.

The main goal of the CDAS strategy is to implement a coherent, cross-platform approach to the acquisition and support of survivability equipment. The aim is to provide survivability according to platform and role while allowing capabilities to be easily upgraded to address changes in the threat environment or obsolescence. In parallel, the strategy addresses the needs to optimise through-life cost-effectiveness and provide Nations with an operational sovereignty.

The CDAS TDP will develop an architecture that can easily integrate the different sensors and effectors that may be required for a given platform and role. A flexible, open-architecture approach with standardised interfaces will be developed, together with a common approach to programming. The outcome will be a coordinated, optimised response to threats based on the various sensor and effector capabilities fitted to the platform. The approach is based onthe combat-proven capabilities of the DAS integration in HIDAS as used on UK Apache helicopters and the BAKER upgrade for UK Chinook platforms.

In early 2011 SELEX Galileo successfully demonstrated the first iteration of the CDAS system to senior UK MoD stakeholders. The demonstration showed the implementation of common, open message formats being used to perform handover between BAE Systems AAR-57 UV MWS and Thales Elix-IR TWS to SELEX Galileo's ECLIPSE Pointer Tracker System. The demonstration also showed how system flexibility is improved by installing the SELEX Galileo DAS Controller. It is particularly important that the demonstrations showed that the controller could translate and process data from various equipment specific message formats into the new open formats using a mixture of 1553B and Ethernet links whilst maintaining the rapid response capability of the operational HIDAS and BAKER system solutions.

Having successfully completed this demonstration, the CDAS team are now preparing for the flight trials in September 2011. During the trials the CDAS system will be installed onto a Lynx helicopter and flown against complex threat scenarios to demonstrate the improvements in platform survivability.

Source: Selex Galileo

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