Systematic Study Of Airborne Early Warning Radar Flight Test Methods

Flight testing is the key step before putting the Airborne Early Warning Radar into use or after the necessary repairs. The current AEWR flight test method is mainly reference to the Ground-Based Radar’s specifications, which can’t comprehensively reflect the real performance of the AEWR. Meanwhile, flight test is also a time-consuming and costly process. The flight test of the new type radars often last for more than two years, which will spend a lot of manpower, material and financial resources. Thus, systematic study of the flight test method of AEWR becomes particularly important. The main work and achievements in this paper are shown as follows:1. Analysis the detection performance of AEWR. It needs to know the detection performance of AEWR before arranging this radar’s flight test. Hence, according to the ground clutter echo power model, we introduce the partition ground grid, backscatter model, transformation of space coordinate system, antenna directional pattern. By this, we establish the target echo and the power model of noise, based on which we achieve the simulation and plot the distance-velocity blind zone map, which can comprehensively reflect the detection performance of AEWR.2. Program flight test program. According to clutter echo power figure, it analyzes the selection problem of flying test area concerned in flight. To overcome the weakness of head-on flight of carrier aircraft and target aircraft in current flight test, it proposes the route design principle of arrangement oblique flying by different azimuth. By this principle and distance-velocity blind zone map, it designs the flight test routes based on the example of upward orientation in some weak detection ability of AEWR. Through such, to find out the weakness zone of detection ability of radar as much as possible and reduce the time consumption in one test flight, it develops the invisible route for target aircraft that cannot be seen to carrier aircraft.3. Research on test measurement data processing methods. In this paper, it establishes a test series of procedure of measurement data processing. For example, first deal with the preprocessing the data by time registration, coordinate transformation and outliers eliminating, and then have the data division as certain distance sampling interval, furthermore, evaluate the two important indicators of AEWR that detection power and measurement accuracy. When doing data partitioning, according to the results of interest to the user, the sample points are calculated from the discovery probability statistical reliability into the detection range of statistical reliability, then calculate the reasonable distance sampling interval. For analysis of the measured data, we find that there has a large deviation measurement accuracy problem in aircraft turns, analyzes the causes of deviations produced and proposed solutions. By comparison revision one to before correction of the target track, it proves the feasibility of the solution.4. Making flight test simulation software. It introduces the block diagram and the specific implement method of this software and demonstrates the simulation of flight test of the carrier aircraft and target aircraft. This software overcomes some shortcomings of previous MATLAB software just like dull GUI, with a friendly interface and good dynamic visualization.