Writing for AIN, Chris Pocock wrote: “BAE Systems has provided further reassurance that the Eurofighter Typhoons serving with the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) can fully take over the ground-attack and strike roles from the service’s Tornado fleet, which is due to be retired by March 2019. The company is promising “a seamless transition of capability from Tornado to Typhoon by the end of 2018.” But one key RAF Tornado capability is not scheduled for transfer— the Reconnaissance Airborne Pod for TORnado (RAPTOR)—even though it is currently providing vital imagery over Iraq and Syria to the coalition partners engaged in Operation Inherent Resolve.”
So how big a capability gap will the withdrawal of Raptor leave?
At the 10 January IOC ‘event’ (and previously), a number of people said that Raptor is still very much required, and that it is still being used pretty well every day on Shader. Tornado folk tend to say that it does things that you can’t do with a Litenining pod, or similar, and that it’s very high resolution and LOROP capabilities can’t be matched by targeting pods. That would seem to be borne out by the fact that similar recce pods are still being acquired in addition to Sniper and Litening pods, by a number of Rafale, F-15 and F-16 operators.
But at the same 10 January event, Air Vice-Marshal Harvey Smyth (Air Officer Commanding No.1 Group) sounded a contradictory note. Speaking to Chris Pocock and I, he said that there wasn’t much tasking for Raptor. He also said that Raptor capabilities were being directly replaced by capabilities on a range of platforms – including a ‘wide body’.
(What system is that, and on which widebody?)
At RIAT last year Air Commodore Ian Gale, Assistant Chief of Staff Capability Development C2ISR and Senior Responsible Owner, Air ISTAR, said that Raptor would be relaced by a ‘suite’ of existing already in-service ISR capabilities, including space-based.
Of course the DB110 has been flown on a Reaper, and I understand that there has been some consideration of putting RAPTOR on current Reapers or on the new Protectors, but this does not seem to be a definite decision, nor anything like one.
Although the Royal Air Force
reportedly completed a series of test flights of the Rafael Reccelite XR reconnaissance pod on the Eurofighter Typhoon (or were these trials on Tornado?) in late 2015 or early 2016, procurement of Reccelite is not currently planned.
Instead, some Typhoon Force senior officers have suggested that the forthcoming Litening 5 pod on Typhoon will replace RAPTOR. I'm sure that Litening 5 will be a huge improvement on Litening 3, and maybe on RecceLite, but will it adequately replace DB110 in RAPTOR?
At the 25 January Tornado ‘do’ I’m told that the RAF Marham Station Commander Group Captain Cab Townsend apparently said that EOTS would replace the Raptor pod’s ISR capabilities.How can this be so, given that EOTS is effectively an internally mounted set of previous generation Sniper LDP LRUs?
I understand that the F-35's sensor fusion, AESA radar and sheer connectivity will make it an extremely powerful ISR tool, but I'm curious about the impact of losing the particular ISR capability represented by RAPTOR.
I'm not looking for anyone to spill the beans as to what is going to happen - I'm interested in opinions as to the implications.