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Turkey selects Ultra for torpedo defence
Tuesday, 11 September, 2007
Ultra Electronics’ Sonar and Communication Systems business has won a EUR3 million contract to supply its Sea Sentor surface ship torpedo defence (SSTD) system for the Turkish Navy’s MILGEM corvette programme.
The deal marks the first international sales success for Sea Sentor, an export adaptation of the Sonar 2170 SSTD system previously supplied by Ultra to the UK Royal Navy (RN).
Under contract to Havelsan (contracting agent on behalf of the MILGEM consortium), Ultra will initially supply a single Sea Sentor shipset, plus support, to equip the lead MILGEM corvette. There are prospects for follow-on orders, with Turkey planning to acquire a class of up to 12 MILGEM ships. Sea Sentor has previously been evaluated by the US Navy, being fitted to the experimental high-speed vessel Sea Fighter for an extended trials period.
Uplifting technology from Sonar 2170, Sea Sentor is a reactive soft-kill torpedo defence system designed to detect, classify and locate torpedoes, formulate tactical advice to the command, and enable the deployment of expendable acoustic countermeasures. Its key components comprise a passive towed receive array streamed from a stern winch; a flexible towed body acoustic countermeasure device deployed from the same winch; decoy launchers; and expendable acoustic devices designed to decoy the inbound torpedo. Inboard equipment includes a processing cabinet, a control unit, and operator and bridge displays.
According to Ultra, the Sea Sentor variant to be supplied to the MILGEM programme will be adapted to allow remote operation of the stern winch from the bridge. It will also feature extra sonar displays, and an interface to allow the acoustic decoys to be programmed while in the launcher.
The RN, which declared an initial operating capability with Sonar 2170 in October 2004, has received 16 SSTD shipsets. These are being rotated in the fleet as operations demand.