UK RAF Wedgetail AEW&C completes first flight
Boeing’s first RAF Wedgetail takes to the skies. (Photo: Boeing/Crown Copyright)
The future UK E-7 fleet will operate from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland and the inaugural test flight is of one of three aircraft currently under modification in Birmingham, UK, where the flight took off from.
Boeing has completed the first flight of a UK Royal Air Force (RAF) E-7 Wedgetail and conducted functional checks marking a significant milestone in the programme’s test and evaluation phase.
The aircraft is in service with Australia, South Korea and Turkey with two rapid prototype E-7 aircraft being built for the US Air Force. In 2023, NATO announced the selection of the E-7 for its Airborne Early Warning & Control (AEW&C) mission.
NATO gave approval to the purchase of six aircraft in November 2023 and the first aircraft has been planned to achieve operational capability in 2031 by which time the alliance’s E-3As will have been in service for more than four decades.
The deal was described by NATO as ‘one of NATO’s biggest-ever capability purchases’ and with Shephard Defence Insight estimating unit cost at US$392 million (based on the UK purchase), the order could be worth as much as $2.4 billion.
The E-7 detects and identifies adversarial targets at long range and tracks multiple airborne and maritime threats simultaneously with 360° coverage via the Multi-role Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) sensor. It provides the warfighter with multi-domain awareness and command-and-control decision advantage.
In the next few months, following a series of flight tests and further evaluation, the aircraft will receive its RAF livery.
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