"No threat is more serious to aviation" than that posed by MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defense Systems) noted former US Secretary of State Colin Powell recently. The widely proliferated MANPADS are produced by the former Soviet Union and the US. Up to 500,000 MANPADS are thought to be in the worldwide inventory, with at least 5,000 and perhaps as many as 150,000 in the hands of up to 25 different terrorist organizations.

MANPADS work most commonly by sensing the heat produced by an aircraft's engines and homing in on that heat source. As they do not use radar to find and track their targets, they can be exceptionally difficult to detect and once detected counter. Small, easy to use and conceal, widely distributed and lethal, MANPADS are consistently noted as a significant threat to military aviation and increasingly to commercial aircraft as well. In addition to the possibility for loss of military and civilian lives, the loss of a commercial airliner to MANPADS would have a devastating economic impact to the worldwide commercial airline industry - an industry that is just beginning to recover from the economic impacts of the September 11 attacks.

Imagine this scenario: you are belted into your seat in a commercial airliner climbing away from takeoff. Gazing out your window, you see a flash of metal which passes vertically behind one of the engines on the aircraft, and just have time to develop a vague sense of the metal flash trailing smoke. On landing after an otherwise uneventful flight, you learn that the aircraft that you were on was attacked on takeoff by a heat-seeking missile.

The Solution

The most widely deployed systems to defeat MANPADS use brightly burning flares ejected from the back of an aircraft or helicopter to provide an alternate heat source and confuse the seeker head of the missile. Northrop Grumman has developed military solutions which may be adaptable to commercial airliners. The Northrop Grumman LAIRCM system, already in service to protect large military aircraft, collects information from a variety of sensors, performs analysis on that information to detect a missile launch, and then directs the energy beam from a high intensity laser to destroy the capacity of the missile to continue to home in on the target aircraft.

The Program

In early 2004, Northrop Grumman contracted the M-COTS Engineering team within Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing to develop a processing board for its LAIRCM system. Northrop's requirements included the development of a dual CPU Altivec enabled single board computer, on a custom form factor with the capacity to operate from -40°C to +85° while withstanding significant levels of shock and vibration. Additional challenges included the provision of a large number of proprietary I/O interfaces and the ability to withstand the mechanical stresses created by the thermal cycling inherent in
high-altitude flight.

Northrop considered that Curtiss-Wright would be ideal for the job, especially considering that the program schedule had only six months allocated from contract award to the delivery of first units to Northrop.

In response to this challenge, the M-COTS team within Embedded Computing developed the CCA-145. This is a custom form factor, dual processor single board computer, with significant architectural similarities to Curtiss-Wright's latest SBC product line. By leveraging a current design, the team was able to afford Northrop significant schedule and cost savings over a ground up design. Further, as many of the technical challenges had already been overcome, overall project risk was greatly reduced.

The Curtiss-Wright M-COTS team met its schedule and provided initial hardware to Northrop six months after contract award. In May 2005, one short year after the start of the project, the CCA-145 successfully passed the last of its grueling environmental tests and was declared production ready.

For a copy of the Program Profile above in pdf format click here (registration required).