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Raytheon's new small-diameter bomb (SDB).
FARNBOROUGH–Raytheon UK has unveiled a domestically developed derivative of its parent company's StormBreaker small-diameter bomb (SDB).
The company’s Red Kite glide bomb uses the same airframe as the U.S.-made weapon, but incorporates 95% UK content, including the seeker, warhead and mission system.
The weapon has been under development for the past five years. Raytheon believes the timing is right to reveal the program publicly as it seeks to fill a potential gap in the Royal Air Force's arsenal and respond to the government's Defense Investment Plan (DIP), which calls for a stockpiled high-low mix of weapons.
In that concept, “high” refers to complex, expensive high-end systems, while “low” describes lower-cost weapons that can be produced and acquired in greater numbers.
Aviation Week first reported that the weapon was in development last September.
To develop Red Kite, Raytheon has leaned on its experience developing the Paveway IV precision-guided bomb kit to establish a UK onshore weapons development capability using digital engineering. The result is the company's first sovereign precision weapon to be fully designed and digitally engineered in the UK.
“We have brought a lot of our digital engineering processes into this,” James Gray, Raytheon UK’s managing director and chief executive, tells Aviation Week. “That has given us the skills and the intellectual property here in the UK to be able to build a weapon from the ground up,” he says.
Using the existing StormBreaker airframe offers significant advantages because the weapons share the same external dimensions, weight and balance, allowing quicker integration on aircraft already cleared to carry StormBreaker. “That's where the similarity ends,” Gray says. “Everything else has been designed here in the UK.”
Red Kite will be a simpler, less expensive weapon by comparison; it lacks StormBreaker’s millimeter-wave radar seeker, for example.
But Gray says the weapon will be both capable and complementary to other UK weapons, providing an “additive capability” within the affordable-mass category. Raytheon is hoping the weapon will appeal for frontline use on the RAF’s combat aircraft, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Eurofighter Typhoon, and Gray hopes to engage with the RAF on a potential acquisition.
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