Solving security, integration and system performance challenges for today’s – and tomorrow’s – Air Force Artwork

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MercuryNOW

Solving security, integration and system performance challenges for today’s – and tomorrow’s – Air Force

April 11, 2022 • Host: Ralph A. Guevarez - Mercury Systems • Season 2 • Episode 7

0:00 | 5:05

Recorded live at the Air Force Association’s Aerospace Warfare Symposium #AWS22 in Orlando, FL, watch this MercuryNOW vodcast with Tad Ihns, director of business development, as he discusses the high-performance mission computers, encryption technologies, and open scalable solutions Mercury is bringing to aircraft and the pilots who fly them.

Ralph Guevarez:

Hello, and welcome to MercuryNOW, a Vodcast series brought to you by Mercury Systems. I am your host, Ralph Guevarez, and today we are coming to you live from the Air Force Association's Aerospace Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida, where Mercury is showcasing technology to solve security, integration, and system performance challenges for today's and tomorrow's Air Force. Joining me at this time is Tad Ihns, CTO for Mission Systems at Mercury. Tad, good to see you.

Tad Ihns:

Great to see you.

Ralph Guevarez:

Thank you for being here.

Tad Ihns:

It's a great day.

Ralph Guevarez:

Tad, my first question is, Air Force applications are becoming more advanced to enable the pilot to make split-second decisions. How is Mercury enabling this?

Tad Ihns:

Well, in many different ways, but I have a great story to tell you about communications. Because as we all know, communications when you're flying is absolutely critical, and today the communication space on aircraft is getting more and more complicated. More radios, more data coming into the aircraft. And that puts a big burden on those pilots. How do I communicate quickly?

So what we did, because there are many different radios, there used to be single purpose control heads in the cockpit, and each one had a different way of operating it. Can you imagine if your phone, each phone had a different way to dial? Think about the microtech from 20 years ago. Today with our smartphones, we're used to handing a phone to somebody, they immediately know how to dial or order an Amazon book. We almost did the same thing for control heads for radios and other cockpit devices.

And it's taken a long time, but by listening carefully to war fighters and pilots in the cockpit with their experiences, we learned that they wanted one simple way to tune radios. No matter what the radio type was, they wanted to, as you said, to help them with those split second decisions.

So we can let them select a radio, tune it, reducing the education requirement and building their confidence in what they're doing. And that really is a great story of how we've listened, made it a reality as the unit over here that I'm showing you is going on all versions of F16. Army PM fixed wing has standardized on it because of that intuitive nature of tuning radios, helping pilots make those critical split-second decisions.

Ralph Guevarez:

Thank you for that, Tad. Now, the desire to modernize existing aircrafts continues to grow, but solving 21st century requirements with existing legacy systems seems difficult. Now, how has Mercury met that challenge?

Tad Ihns:

You're absolutely right. When you look out at the fleet of aircraft today, not only with the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, there are a lot of older generation aircraft. But everyone wants to bring newer processors, newer displays. That way we can enable more modern software that again makes the aircraft more mission capable.

So I have a great story. Mercury was very fortunate to be selected for the cockpit retrofit for the A10, the Warthog. Iconic aircraft. I mean, if you've been to an air show over the last 25 years, you've seen an A10. So what we're doing is just what you said. We're bringing 21st century systems, full HD display for the pilot for the first time, pulling out old what they call steam gauges, and replacing it with a bright, full color, full HD display where we can show targeting pod information, map information, all the flight instruments.

So using the best of model-based software engineering, we're bring safety elements to the airplane that have never been there before. Flood fill for flying the airplane, we're bringing interfaces to systems that are now going to be graphical versus an old steam gauge that people would have to monitor or a warning light here. We're bringing it all in a bright, full color display backed up by two different kinds of mission computers, a flight critical mission computer and a regular just mission systems computer, tied in with secure high-speed memory that's fully encrypted.

So when we talk about a complete story of integrating 21st century requirements and capabilities into something that's an iconic legacy aircraft, the A10 is a great example where we're pulling together displays, processing, fully-encrypted, secure storage, all in one.

Ralph Guevarez:

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

Tad Ihns:

Absolutely.

Ralph Guevarez:

Now, where can our viewers get more information on everything that we discussed?

Tad Ihns: