Can Eurofighters radar win UKs biggest engineering prize?
BAE Systems Avionics Group, based in Edinburgh, has been shortlisted for this year’s 50,000 Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award, the UK’s most coveted prize for engineering innovation, for the world’s first airborne radar that can see all the targets all the time. The unique ECR-90 microwave radar was developed specially for Eurofighter, although it may well be applied to other aircraft in future. Professor John Roulston, Paul Holbourn, Tony Kinghorn, David Graham and Russell Shoulder have spent 10 years solving some of the most intractable problems in radar technology to come up with a world-beating design. ECR-90 solves a fundamental problem experienced by all previous airborne radar systems – called the “look-down” problem, where the radar signal from the ground itself obscures that of any genuine airborne targets flying close to the ground. Previous approaches have had to compromise the interval of space or speed range in which targets were detectable in order to avoid thi
