BAE Systems Will Supply Flight Control and Target Identification Systems for Boeing’s Carrier-Based MQ-25

June 18, 2019

William Kucinski

BAE Systems plc is the latest to join the Boeing Company ’s MQ-25 Stingray team. At the 2019 International Paris Air Show, BAE announced that it will supply the Vehicle Management Control System and Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) System for Boeing’s new carrier-based unmanned air refueling platform.

The Vehicle Management Control System will control all of the MQ-25’s flight surfaces and perform overall vehicle management duties for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). BAE has already contributed flight control systems to numerous commercial aircraft and several military aircraft platforms like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lighting II, McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle and F-18 Hornet, Saab JAS 39 Gripen, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited Tejas, Korean Aerospace Industries T-50 Golden Eagle, and Boeing CH-47 Chinook.

BAE’s IFF system ensures operation in contested environments by reliably identifying both friendly and enemy vehicles with a high probability of detection, high probability of correct identification, and low false-alarm rate. The company has extensive experience with processing single and multiple views of objects taken with radar, ladar, visible, infrared, hyperspectral, and sonar sensors and its advanced target detection algorithms have been implemented using both commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and next-generation sensors. The involvement with the MQ-25 will bring the number of platforms in BAE’s IFF portfolio up to 150.

William Kucinski is content editor at SAE International, Aerospace Products Group in Warrendale, Pa. Previously, he worked as a writer at the NASA Safety Center in Cleveland, Ohio and was responsible for writing the agency’s System Failure Case Studies. His interests include literally anything that has to do with space, past and present military aircraft, and propulsion technology.

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