ROYAL AIR FORCE
Brockie says one of the priorities for the unit is to drive innovation and see how to exploit the freely available technology now in the commercial sector and bring it into the military context . One way the unit is doing that is with Project Raven .
" Raven is something the team here came up with about five years ago ," says Brockie . " They were getting frustrated with the equipment and thought they could do better themselves - systems and hardware - to actually deliver the services we need ."
Raven has met a number of particular use cases – either as an experiment or to plug a capability gap . As an example of an experiment , the Raven team linked a
Typhoon fighter pilot with RAF Regiment personnel on the ground and Air Command in High Wycombe with full-motion video , all on the same voice radio network and all seeing the same picture . Air Command is able to give release authority for weapons , effectively linking the sensor to the shooter to the decider .
Exploiting a software-defined virtual architecture , Raven is able to respond to the changing information requirements – pretty much how everything in the modern world is designed these days – and bring it into a military context .
One of the biggest challenges is dealing with legacy equipment that is often locked
168 January 2022