Leonardo’s Osprey 50 AESA Radar Equipped on Beechcraft Plane Completes First Flight Test

Leonardo’s new Osprey 50 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar equipped on a B200 King Air has completed its first flight test in the UK.

The new radar is a larger-aperture variant of Leonardo’s Osprey surveillance radar. The flight trials were carried out in support of production for a Strategic ISR platform and Collins Aerospace’s Tactical Synthetic Aperture Radar (TacSAR) reconnaissance system, the company said in a statement Thursday.

Osprey is a multi-mode radar family based on solid-state AESA technology and remains the only system of its type currently available which delivers full spherical coverage with no moving parts. This allows the radar to be installed on platforms where a rotating antenna would be unsuitable, Leonardo claims.

Osprey 50 could be used in overland, maritime and air-to-air missions. It is ideally suited to medium and large aircraft which can provide the required space and power. It has been developed from the Osprey 30 model, which is available in fixed-panel and gimballed variants. The Osprey 30 is installed on the US Navy MQ-8C Firescout (where it is

designated AN/ZPY-8) and on the Norwegian All-Weather Search and Rescue helicopter, the Leonardo AW101.

In addition, Leonardo has re-used Hardware and signal processing techniques developed for the Osprey family to refresh its Seaspray family of AESA surveillance radars to increase capability and reduce system weight.