The new DIRCM solution, which the UK Ministry of Defence began to fund back in 2017, is planned to be fitted to a 'range' of RAF aircraft including the ISR collector Beechcraft SHADOW in its R2 incarnation and the Airbus A-400M ATLAS cargo plane.
The latest campaign of trials has been conducted at the Vidsel Test Range in Sweden, and has seen the operational system defeat 100% of the infrared heat-seeking 'threats' fired at it. The new DIRCM combines Thales’s ELIX-IR threat warning system that quickly detects and identify the launch of missiles, using a series of algorithms to filter out background clutter so that only valid threats are tracked, classified and declared.
Once the threats have been classified, an alert is sent to the Leonardo’s MIYSIS directed infrared countermeasure which moves to track the incoming missile and directs a jamming laser onto the missile. The DIRCM will ultimately be controlled and employed, in coordination with other decoys, by the Modular Advanced Platform Protection System (MAPPS), also by Leonardo UK.
Development of the MAPPS has been launched in 2021 with the signing of a Strategic Partnering Arrangement (SPA) between Leonardo UK and the Royal Air Force, Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S) and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). Under this partnering, Leonardo UK works alongside the Ministry of Defence (MOD), Dstl’s scientists and other UK industry partners to further develop platform-level integrated protection systems for UK aircraft.
Leonardo UK is the UK’s onshore provider of integrated Air Platform Protection (APP) capabilities. The company already provides protective equipment for many UK Armed Forces aircraft from its research and manufacturing sites in Edinburgh and Luton, including for RAF Typhoons, Shadow R2 surveillance aircraft, E-7 Wedgetail airborne early warning aircraft and the majority of the UK’s helicopter fleet including the AW159 Wildcat, AW101 Merlin and Apache AH-64E.
The combined new DIRCM specifically has been designed and developed by the Team Pellonia partnership between Leonardo UK, Thales UK, and the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. Pellonia, named after the Roman goddess who was renowned for protecting people from their enemies, was formally set up in July 2022 as a collaborative national enterprise approach to delivering UK next-generation air survivability (NGAS) solutions.
While not involved in the DIRCM specifically, Chemring is also part of Pellonia, as the UK-based global leader in design, development, testing and manufacture of RF and IR countermeasures, including active decoys and threat agnostic countermeasures. Depending on the platform and requirements, the team can mix sensors and effectors including Leonardo’s Miysis Directed Infrared Countermeasure (DIRCM), Thales’s Elix-IR Threat Warning System (TWS), Thales’s Vicon XF Countermeasures Dispensing System (CMDS) and Chemring’s full suite of expendable countermeasures.