Peregrine ISREW aircraft ‘will be a game-changer

The Peregrines are being acquired under Phase 1 of Defence’s Project Air 555 and will deliver an unprecedented electronic surveillance and electronic warfare capability to the RAAF.

The Royal Australian Air Force’s second MC-55A Peregrine takes off from Majors Airport, Greenville, Texas. Picture: @SR–PLANESPOTTER

The first of four MC-55A Peregrine intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and electronic warfare (ISREW) aircraft will be delivered to the Royal Australian Air Force before the end of the year, according to the prime contractor, L3Harris Technologies.

The news, delivered on the eve of the Australian International Airshow at Avalon in March, is no doubt welcomed by Defence, following significant technical delays to the program.

The four aircraft are heavily modified Gulfstream Aerospace 550 business jets, and challenges encountered with the design, engineering and certification of the hull form – known as the outer mould line – have played a major part in the RAAF project’s delays.

“I’m happy to announce that the flight tests for the US Federal Aviation Administration were completed in July 2024 and in the fourth quarter Gulfstream obtained the Supplemental Type Certificate for the MC-55A platform – a huge milestone of the program,” L3Harris Technologies ISR president Jason Lambert said.

Lambert said that while aerodynamic flight testing was being undertaken, the company was outfitting a second aircraft with the mission systems specified by the RAAF at its facility in Greenville, Texas, and the first functional test flight was made in December 2024.

“All this is positioning us to deliver this capability to the RAAF this calendar year, 2025,” Lambert added. “In addition to the aircraft, the ground stations are now being built at Greenville and those will be delivered to the RAAF in Australia before the delivery of the first aircraft. We’re very excited to be able to talk to the leadership here in country and be able to deliver this capability – not just for multi-mission ISR and electronic warfare, but also to be able to provide the communications linkages between ground, space and sea assets in the battle space.”

The Peregrines are being acquired under Phase 1 of Defence’s Project Air 555 and will deliver an unprecedented electronic surveillance and electronic warfare capability to the RAAF. After delivery to Australia, likely to be in early 2026 after acceptance work in the US, they will be based at RAAF Edinburgh in South Australia.

The full capabilities of the sensor suite aboard the aircraft are, naturally, classified and Lambert said that Air 555 is the first time the complete system has been installed in a business jet-size airframe.

“I can’t comment on the specific capability set, other than the fact that it does have pieces of electronic warfare and multi-mission ­strategic ISR equipment,” he said. “Sometimes it is known as multi-int, or multi-intelligence, meaning that there’s several different ­intelligence collecting systems on the aircraft.”

Much of this equipment, or at least similar versions of it, have been flying aboard the much larger Boeing RC-135V/W Rivet Joint intelligence-gathering aircraft that are often seen on the evening news being intercepted by Chinese or Russian fighters.

“There are other ‘missionised’ business jets that other countries operate, but I can say that this is the first aircraft of its kind with this volume of capability and volume of sensor suite package on a business jet,” Lambert added.

“I’ll go even further to say that, from an ISR capability on this jet platform, there is nothing else in the world that matches the MC-55A Peregrine.

“What it provides in the strategic capability, and command and control, along with being able to link assets together and be a force multiplier for air, sea, space and ground forces, is really going to be a game-changer for the RAAF.”