You could almost here the muted strains of "God Save the Queen" in the background at Raytheon's ASTOR (Airborne STand-Off Radar) press conference on Tuesday.

"We've got jobs in Northern Ireland, we've got jobs in Scotland, we've got jobs in North Wales," urged Peter McKee, managing director of Raytheon Systems Ltd. Almost 2,000 additional, relatively high-paying jobs would be created in the UK if the RSL consortium that includes Bombardier Aerospace, GEC-Marconi, Steyr, Marshalls and Motorola, and Ultra Electronics (UK), were to win the £1.253-billion MoD ASTOR contract, McKee said.

With program growth, the number of additional jobs might reach 6,000, he said. "This is very important in the current political environment when so many other firms are cutting back," McKee pointed out. 70% of the economic and technical content of the ASTOR program would remain in the UK under the RSL proposal.

ASTOR would use high-performance business aircraft, fitted with special-mission radar packages, to be the eyes in the sky for a ground-based communications, command and control system that includes almost a dozen datalink transceivers and a centralized command center. Under the RSL proposal, five Bombardier Global Express business aircraft, capable of initial cruising altitudes in excess of FL 400 and on-station times of 14-plus hours, would be fitted with an advanced optical sensor, plus a wide-area, swath radar, a moving target indication system, and a target acquisition system.

RSL officials were quick to note that ASTOR is not an airborne battle management or command and control system, such as JSTARs.

They said their proposal features five aircraft, instead of the four offered by competitors, and that the Global Express has twice the electrical redundancy (four generators), 20% more floor space and 25% more cabin volume than the Gulfstream V.

If MoD gives the go-ahead for ASTOR in early 1999, and if RSL were to win the contract, initial service deliveries could begin by 2003.

By Fred George