F/A-18 Super Hornet To Fly Into 2040s With New Weapons & Computing

By Logan Williams, Warrior Editorial Fellow

The F/A-18 E/F “Super Hornet” has been a mainstay of the naval aviation fleet for several decades, it is the U.S. military’s carrier-enabled, fourth-generation fighter jet — think the U.S. Navy’s version of the ubiquitous F-16 fighter jet platform.

The F/A-18 E/F is receiving a new array of upgrades, much as the F-16 did, through the F-16’s Service Life Extension Program.

The F/A-18 E/F’s upgrades will allow the United States to continue fielding the aircraft for a decade or more, by extending the maximum flight time from 6,000 hours to 10,000 hours.

Additionally, these Super Hornets will undergo a technological transformation, which is meant to prepare them to fight a 21st-century war. The airframe will receive a large touchscreen interface in place of older gauges, which gives the pilots the ability to alter the display at will, with ease and for comfort, every time they jump into the cockpit.

The Super Hornet platform will receive an upgraded Distributed Targeting Processor-Networked (DPT-N) mission computer, which can process data approximately 17-times faster than previous mission computers, and which enables the F/A-18 E/F to demonstrate an early form of moderate sensor/data-fusion, although not equal to the serious sensor/data-fusion and other technological capabilities of the fifth-generation F-35 Lighting.

The Super Hornet was also given upgraded Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT), which enables interconnectivity between the aircraft and other network-enabled weapons in the United States’ arsenal. The TTNT enables fighter jets to communicate targeting data and data about the combat environment, with each other in a discrete, closed network — and with other weapons on the ground or in the water (e.g. destroyers and aircraft carriers). This turns each F/A-18 E/F into an intelligence gathering and reconnaissance weapon and it allows each aircraft to act as a network node (for an example of a network node, think your home’s WI-FI router, which both receives information from your home computer, and communicates information back to the computer).

This TTNT is what has enabled the F/A-18 E/F to transform into a drone command center, as the fighter jet pilot communicates with multiple drones at once, commanding a collection of unmanned wing-men — this exercise has only been completed in training, but obviously, its applicability to the inevitable war with China is profound.