AH-64D UPGRADES UNDER WAY
By Karl Schwarz
The numbers speak for themselves: twice the range, reliability 150 percent higher, maintenance effort down by 60 percent, plus savings in operating costs of almost a billion dollars over a period of 20 years. Everyone is talking about Arrowhead, the AH-64’s state-of-the-art target acquisition and designation sight/pilot night vision system. The process of installing it in the US Army’s Apache and Apache Longbows commenced in June, and by 2011 704 of the attack helicopters should have been fitted with the system. “We have been needing these capabilities for some time,” says Lieutenant Colonel Shane Openshaw from the US Army’s Apache Program Office, “as they will enable us to detect and attack the enemy at distances that simply are not possible today.” The system will finally allow the range potential of the Hellfire guided missile (approx. 8km) to be fully utilised.
Arrowhead’s design has a similar architecture to the original Target Acquisition and Designation Sight/Pilot Night Vision Sensor (TADS/PNVS), but uses electronics modules based on the latest technology. This applies especially to the thermal imager (FLIR), which has three levels of zoom and is capable of tracking several targets at once. Moreover, the lower half of the rotatable nose turret contains a laser rangefinder, a laser spot tracker and a CCD TV camera. Instead of looking through an optics system, the gunner sitting in the front cockpit now views the sensor imagery on a liquid crystal display.
The upper half containing the night vision systems for the pilot accommodates a FLIR and a CCD TV camera with night vision intensifier. Special processing algorithms lend the sensor imagery a much greater sharpness of detail and thus facilitate the detection of obstacles at low altitude.
Now read on....
http://www.flug-revue.rotor.com/FRHe...07/FR0507b.htm
Linear Mode
