Italy’s Elettronica has long been a player in the electronic warfare (EW) sector and is also one of the few companies to be able to offer solutions for both European and Russian platforms. The company is perhaps most well-known for being one of the major designers for the EW systems installed on the four-nation Eurofighter.
Mirroring the same four-nation partnership, the company is teamed with the UK's Leonardo, Germany's Hensoldt, and the Spanish firm Indra to form the EuroDASS consortium, which is charged with developing a Defensive Aids Subsystem (DASS) that is a next-generation electronic warfare (EW) suite for the Eurofighter. The design concept is being called the “Praetorian Evolution” and is supposed to build on the aircraft’s current-generation Praetorian DASS.
The next-generation design will be an all-digital architecture and will see the EW suite performing more than just self-protection functionality. The rationale for developing this new DASS is that the current design on-board the Eurofighter dates back to the 1980s and early 1990s. This older-generation configuration essentially makes it impossible to expand the system’s functionality; there is no expansion capacity to plug in new modes and it consigns the system to eventual obsolescence.
In October 2019 Leonardo announced the beginning of an 18-month study that would be central to the concept definition phase of the new EW system. A press release that announced the contract for the study stated that the contract award would form part of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) study that is supposed to define an entire schedule of potential upgrades for the Eurofighter as a whole.
Ultimately the new DASS and the other upgrades are supposed to keep the Eurofighter an operationally relevant platform until 2050. One of the key drivers has been the emerging threats in air defense technology, such as the Russian S-400 and S-500 batteries and new developments from the Chinese industry as well.
Aside from the Eurofighter, Elettronica has worked extensively in the past on EW solutions for export versions of Russian fighter aircraft. The company cooperated with India’s Defence Avionics Research Establishment to develop a high-performance EW system with a scalable, modular architecture for the MiG-35. The system can receive signals from multiple channels, processing them using an India-developed signal processing suite, and then devising appropriate jamming countermeasures to be initiated by jammers linked to the output channels.
The company has continued its work in India in an MoU signed last year with Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) for the joint development, commercialization, and production of New Generation EW Surveillance Systems. The systems that they develop will be targeted at the worldwide market in addition to Indian national requirements.
Several other EW firms that spoke to AIN have stated that Elettronica’s designs are among the best in the industry, particularly in the area of signal processing and then transmitting an effective countermeasure. One of the Belarusian engineers working at Aircraft Repair Plant No. 558 stated that “one of the keys to effective EW is the system being able to instantaneously react to the irregular signal patterns of modern, frequency-hopping radars. Elettronica’s are some of the only systems capable of this, and this makes them a market leader in this technology.”