SPY-6 humming @ HII-Ingalls

ARLINGTON, Va. - Following successful at-sea trials of its SPY-6 radar in the Gulf of Mexico, Raytheon Technologies is planning for more tests of other variants of the radar later this year. SPY-6 was operated at sea for the first time in December, aboard the future destroyer Jack H. Lucas, which departed from Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Miss., for its alpha (initial) trials, a series of at-sea tests before a ship is delivered to the Navy. The Air and Missile Defense Radar, the SPY-6 V1, with four large radar faces, had to be tightly fitted into the ship along with the Lockheed Martin-made Aegis Combat System. “(W)e really hit a home run with the performance," Mike Mills, SPY-6 program director for Raytheon, told Defense News. There were a couple of things the team saw during the trials that will have to be fixed before the next round of at-sea testing and for its V2 and V3 radars into 2024. The first of those tests will later in 2023. The future amphibious transport dock Richard M. McCool Jr. has its V2 radar already installed. The Ingalls team will activate it with a couple of months, Mills said. Once it's up and running, the team can prepare for the first at-sea trials scheduled for this summer. The V2 and V3 systems use the same radar face, but V2 uses a single rotating face and the V3 uses three fixed faces to achieve 360-degree coverage. Its V4 medium-sized four-face radar is being backfit onto the Flight IIA destroyers at Ingalls, Mills said, and work is underway to rip out the SPY-1 radar and installing SPY-6. Several lessons have already emerged. Mills said production is humming, and the firm is ready to respond to any changes to the shipbuilding plan, including additional Flight III destroyers Congress asked the Navy to buy in FY 2023. (Defense News 01/16/23) Raytheon preparing for more radar milestones after first at-sea test (defensenews.com) 
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