Aircraft Survivability Re-routing

As the US continues to dominate air-to-air combat, the ability to maintain complete air supremacy will be challenged primarily from the ground. Airborne operations that require low altitude flight at relatively low speeds for any duration of time are particularly vulnerable to ground-based threats. TSC will investigate techniques for rotorcraft to increase their survivability by re-planning flight paths in real-time to maintain terrain masking from ground threats. Current algorithms are computationally intensive and cannot respond in real-time to pop-up threats or mobile Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) position changes. TSC’s solution uses several complimentary techniques to drastically reduce the number of computations required. The resulting algorithms will be implemented and evaluated in site-specific scenarios using realistic threat parameters, simulated helicopter flight profiles and signatures, and available DTED. In Phase I, TSC will prove the feasibility of our concepts and estimate their real-time processing speed. In Phase II, TSC will implement the algorithms on a laboratory version of the MH-60R/S to mature and customize them for transition into the Navy’s MH-60R/S fleet.