Thales and Elettronica chose Farnborough this week to announce (and sign) a Memorandum of Understanding that will take both companies further forward in collaboration on joint development and marketing of their electronic warfare technologies. The two companies already have a long history of collaboration on programmes such as the Mirage 2000 aircraft and the HORIZON-class and FREMM frigates.
A perfect example of the benefits of this enhanced collaboration was revealed at the same time. The CYBELE airborne self-protection suite is a scalable system customisable for a wide variety of platforms, operational requirements and doctrines. Embodying an electronic warfare command and control (EWC2) system, CYBELE is aimed primarily at helicopters and transport aircraft, offering two levels of self-protection against surface- and air-launched threats.
The Enhanced level of protection provides an EWC2 capability that controls the laser warning, radar warning, IR missile warning and countermeasures systems as well as the SPARC expemdable active decoy, which will be available in 2017, according to the companies. The Expert level of protection adds electronic support measures, active jamming and directional IR countermeasures.