Laser Jet Over Oklahoma

The Federal Aviation Administration issued three “notices to airman” that indicate that the Air Force is taking its ray gun-equipped 747, the Airborne Laser, out for a little spin this week. Here's one:

7/3701 – .. SPECIAL NOTICE.. EFFECTIVE 0706101700 UTC UNTIL 0706102300 UTC. AIRBORNE LASER OPERATIONS WILL BE CONDUCTED WITHIN 25 NM FROM ANY POINT ALONG A LINE STARTING AT 401212N/1003542W OR THE MC COOK (MCK) VOR/DME AND ENDING AT 362036N/0995248W OR THE GAGE (GAG) VORTAC, NOT EXTENDING BELOW FL180. THIS AREA WILL BE MONITORED BY OBSERVERS AND THE LASER BEAM WILL BE TERMINATED IF NON-PARTICIPATING AIRCRAFT ARE DETECTED THAT MAY ENTER THE AFFECTED AREA. OTHER VISUAL EFFECTS E.G. FLASH BLINDNESS, AFTER IMAGE, GLARE, AND DISTRACTION MAY OCCUR AT GREATER DISTANCES. THE DOMESTIC EVENTS NETWORK /DEN/ AT 202-493-5107,IS THE FAA COORDINATION FACILITY. WIE UNTIL UFN (Check out the other two here.)

It's tough reading. But basically — as you can see from the map — they’ve set up three ranges, two on June 10 and one on June 12.

Two of the test ranges are linear, each running a couple hundred kilometers between navigation beacons and within a short flight from the Boeing Airbone Laser (ABL) facility in Wichita. The third is a circle with a 200 nautical mile radius centered on a beacon in Oklahoma.

Boeing and the Missile Defense Agency, which sponsors the ABL, recently completed the first in-flight “firing” during a flight out of at Edwards Air Force Base in California — I enclose “firing” in quotes because they used a laser to track an airborne target.

The “firing” part — in the common sense of the word — is yet to come. The tests this week are for the “surrogate high energy laser” that is, well, a surrogate for the jet's actual laser weapon.

Here is how Missile Defense Agency (MDA) chief Gen. "Trey" Obering previewed these tests:

I
will tell you that what I have seen since November 2004 is a steady progression. There has been some minor delays here and there as they work through—mainly these are integration issues now. The actual functioning of the components, the laser modules themselves, the optical train and everything else, they have pretty much knocked down the technical issues.

That is not to say that they’re out of the woods. There’s still work to be done. As I said, we should have some significant knowledge points on the program in the coming weeks, especially by the end of June, if they stay on the schedule that they’re on.

We should be able, by that time, to know whether the tracking laser works properly. As I said, we’ve tracked targets 75
kilometers away and closed that fire control loop. We should know if the beam illumination laser, the atmospheric compensation laser, is working properly and feeding that information into the system. And we actually have a surrogate of the high-energy laser on the aircraft as well. So we should know if the entire system is working the way that it is designed by the end of June. That’ll be a significant look ahead.

And then if all of that is successful, we will dismantle—we will put the aircraft back on the ground, we’ll open it up, and we’ll reassemble the high-energy laser on board the aircraft and get that back in the air next year, so that we can attempt to shoot down a boosting missile in the mid-part of 2009.

Michael Fabey with Aviation Week has a nice summary of what MDA and Boeing hope to achieve with the trials of what Obering has called "the first major step towards giving the American people their first light saber."

2009, you say? That’s close, right?

Well, the thing is this is the fourth test date that MDA has identified for the “lethal shoot down.” (The first target: 2002.) The schedule slippage — and a very tough GAO report —
led the House Armed Services Committee to express “little confidence that this date will not slip into 2010 or possibly later” and cut
$400 million from the program. That left a demonstration program that may or may not include a lethal demonstration in the event MDA can pull it off.

So Boeing is gearing up a major effort to save the program that will undoubtedly include any good news from these tests of the surrogate laser.

“What ABL needs to do to stay viable is to make its milestones,” the ABL program officer told Aviation Week.

Stay tuned.

-- Jeffrey Lewis, cross-posted at ArmsControlWonk.com