Hensoldt's New Surveillance Radar Completes Maiden Flight

Hensoldt announced Wednesday that its new PrecISR 1000 airborne multi-mission surveillance radar completed its maiden flight.

The one-week flight campaign was held together with H3 Mission Systems GmbH based in Tussenhausen-Mattsies, Germany.

"Thanks to its simple industry standard interfaces, and to the excellent support of an experienced mission aircraft team at H3, the aircraft was modified and the radar was integrated, tested and flown within two months from kick-off to mission completion," the company said.

Hensoldt claimed that the PrecISR1000 generated a huge amount of high-quality reconnaissance data such as SAR pictures during its first operational flight.

The radar can be installed aboard helicopters, UAVs and fixed-wing mission aircraft. Due to its software-defined radar modes and electronic beam steering, PrecISR can fulfill different tasks virtually at the same time. It is able to detect, track and classify more than a thousand objects.

All radar related components are located outside of the airframe.

PrecISR ground surveillance capabilities include reconnaissance and characterization of fixed targets using Moving Target Indication (MTI), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operating in Spot or Strip mode. For maritime surveillance it characterizes the maritime targets through Maritime Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) operation and Range Profiling. Air surveillance capabilities include detecting and intercepting of low flying aircraft, gathering information on direction and speed of all kinds of targets for correlation with data from other sensors, e.g. ADS-B, AIS, EO/IR.

HENSOLDT has been awarded an order by a provider of airborne special missions operations to deliver PrecISR1000 until year-end for installation underneath a Pilatus PC-12 special operations aircraft.