The Australian Air Force plans to trial Honeywell’s satellite communication solution, JetWave, in May. If all goes well, Honeywell could see a new market for its product, which was released last year.
“We are getting a lot of interest in the military field in the fixed-wing area,” Derek Lockett, Honeywell’s director of sales for the Asia-Pacific region, told Avionics. “In Australia, we are actually in the process of fitting a JetWave system to one of their C-130s, which is the first military aircraft anywhere in the world to have a Jetwave system fitted.”
If the trial is successful, Lockett said Honeywell expects the Air Force to “roll it out across a number of their different transport aircraft.”
Lockett said he could envision the Ka-band system — which is designed for larger aircraft — on not only the Lockheed C-130, but also the Boeing C-17, Alenia C-27 and Airbus A330 multirole tanker transport (MRTT).
The total JetWave package for civil use includes a multi-channel satellite terminal, antenna controller, modem and router hardware, and two different versions of a tail-mounted antenna — the MCS-8000 for the business aviation market and the MCS-8200 for commercial air transport aircraft. Users can connect to the Inmarsat Global Xpress network, which operates over water, over nontraditional flight paths and in remote areas.
Honeywell said it can, through the network, enable mission applications like real-time weather; video conferencing; large file transfer; encryption capabilities; in-flight briefings; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance video; and secure communications. The system is scalable and configurable.