Saab has selected AEL Sistemas as a new supplier for Brazil’s Gripen NG. The local company will provide the wide area display (WAD) and the head-up display (HUD), which will be integrated in the fighter as part of the F-X2 contract.
Development of these programmes commenced in January 2015, with Saab and AEL also signing a contract for technology transfer to commence in the summer at Saab’s base in Linköping, Sweden.
The later focuses on furthering the development of the human machine interface (HMI) for advanced fighters, along with workshops for avionics maintenance. The WAD for Brazil’s Gripen NG aircraft is a single intelligent and full-redundant multi-purpose display system, full-colour, large-screen (19 x 8 in) with continuous image presentation and the state-of-the-art touchscreen controls capability. It is the primary source of all flight and mission information in the cockpit.
Meanwhile, the new HUD provides essential flight and mission information to the pilot when looking in all directions out of the cockpit. The new avionics systems programme will run over four years and includes development, integration and production work to be performed in Porto Alegre.
System integration work will be undertaken by Saab and Embraer. An extensive flight test campaign will then be conducted in close cooperation with AEL at Linköping to demonstrate and validate the new equipment.
Currently the planned 60 or 70 Gripen-Es for the Swedish Air Force are expected to come with a three-display cockpit layout. However, a Saab spokesperson at IDEX told us that as work on the (now much larger) Brazilian programme has been establishing “rather comfortable” schedules compared to the requests of very tight timeframes for Swiss forces – the Flyvapnet may also end up leaning towards the WAD.
– EXCLUSIVE – GRIPEN NG will have Wide Display
– Boeing, AEL Sistemas Link Cockpit Simulators in US and Brazil
