The F-35 avionics test bed aircraft made its first flight Tuesday, capping a three-year effort to transform a commercial airliner into a flying laboratory for Lockheed Martin¹s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).
The JSF Cooperative Avionics Test Bed (CATB), a 737-300 aircraft modified by BAE Systems, which is known as CAT-Bird, completed its inaugural flight in Mojave, Calif. The aircraft is a flying test bed that replicates the F-35 avionics suite. The CAT-Bird will develop and verify the F-35’s capability to collect data from multiple sensors and fuse it into a coherent situational awareness display. "[The CAT-Bird] allows us to concurrently develop and integrate mission systems hardware and software well before it is installed on F-35s,” said Doug Pearson, Lockheed Martin¹s vice president of the F-35 Integrated Test Force.
The inside of the plane was transformed. An F-35 cockpit allows the sensor inputs to be displayed as they would be in the fighter itself. The rest of the aircraft interior houses equipment racks for the avionics equipment, and 20 workstations for technicians to assess the performance of the avionics. The CAT-Bird begins a one-month test flight phase to prove the aerodynamics of the converted airliner. After conclusion of some additional modification work, and the initial flight test phase, the B-737 CAT-Bird will transition to its home base and begin test operations at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth, Texas. More