Gripen jamming trials

From the latest issue of ‘Gripen News’:

In August 2007, seven Swedish Air Force Gripens from Lulea’s F 21 Wing flew to the UK to arrive at the US Air Force base at RAF Lakenheath. The deployment was a friendly squadron exchange with the resident F-15C Eagle fighter unit, but the 17 Swedish Air Force (SwAF) pilots had a deadly serious training mission to complete.

For the first time ever, the SwAP employed Gripen’s complex and highly classified electronic warfare (EW) system outside Sweden, over the UK’s Spadeadam range. This facility is one of only a handful of places in the world where combat jets can fly against functional air defence threats of the kind they might face on an actual combat deployment. In 2006 SwAF Gripens encountered simulated threat systems during their Red Flag’ Alaska deployment, but these were replica emitters and not real hardware.

Major Carl-Johan Edstrom is the commander of F 21’s second squadron and the boss of the Fighter Unit within Sweden’s SEOI rapid reaction unit.

He explained to Gripen News why the UK deployment was so necessary. “We wanted to get all our pilots to encounter the real threat systems that operate in Africa or the Middle East, for example. We needed to validate our aircraft’s systems, the EW libraries for our countermeasures and the tactical maneuvers to defeat the threat.”

“Each day we would fly two missions over the range and one dissimilar air combat sortie against the F-l5Cs. We flew against the Eagles because we couldn’t get three slots on the range each day! We were able to use chaff and flares and also our Litening pods to simulated laser-guided bomb drops for some missions. Our four two-seat Gripen D’s always flew with two pilots. Each guy could see all the tactical data on his screens to maximise the training value.”

“The details of what we achieved are classified but I can tell you we learned a lot and it was great to operate as part of a joint team with TU 39 (the SwAF operational evaluation unit) and FMV.”