firing & exercise ranges
remotely controlled airborne target drones.
The Vidsel standard target drone inventory
incorporates the MQM 178 Fire Jet and the
larger and high performance BQM-167i
from Kratos. Both were to be used during
the four-week campaign. To monitor and
track the missile release and the missile
during flight, the range cine theodolites
and tracking radars were used.
One particular requirement was to fire
an AAVI at noise jammed conditions. To
enable this, the BQM-167i was equipped
with an airborne noise jammer that
actively performed noise jamming during
the target drone sortie. This functionality
was developed specifically for the Swiss
campaign but is now available also for
other users. The target drones were also
equipped with miss distance indicators.
The Swiss campaigns briefly described
above present some of the capabilities of
Vidsel Test Range, which is now gearing up
and looks forward to hosting a number of
interesting projects in the near future. \\
Jonas Linde is director of marketing and sales, senior
test flight engineer, with FMV T&E, Swedish Defence
Material Administration
1002574_V3_ATI Supp_FMV.indd 1 23/07/2019 15:26
AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COM // SHOWCASE 2020 147
their Puma helicopter pilots to combat
readiness status. The first iteration of this
training course was performed in 2010
and has been repeated almost every year
since then. The focus of this course is
Electronic Warfare and its grand finale is
to set up a COMAO with fixed wing
fighters to perform joint missions while
encountering different Electronic Warfare
threats. To stage a realistic training
environment, a number of different test
systems are used. For example a MALINA
UV- threat simulator to activate the
helicopters self-defence system and
Smokey-SAMs (Figure 1).
Chaffs and flares are also deployed
during the course. Another feature that
has been tested is also to incorporate
operations in a GPS jammed environment.
GPS-jamming (NAVWAR) is a capability
for which the demand has increased
notably during recent years. Vidsel Test
Range is one of very few places in Europe
where it is possible to perform live GPS
jamming combined with flight operations,
weapon deliveries and live deployment of
chaffs and flares.
TARGET DRONES
For fixed wing, the latest activity was the
combined Swiss Air Force and Armasuisse
AMRAAM firing campaign that was
performed in 2018.
This was an advanced test activity
where Swiss F/A-18s fired AMRAAM Air
Vehicle Instrumented (AAVI) missiles on
3 // Swiss F/A-18 during a
low-level manoeuvre at
Vidsel Test Range
3
/AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COM