Defense News
11/16/09
SHOW SCOUT
Dubai Airshow 2009
Raytheon Promoting Maverick ‘Fly Before You Buy’ Deal
By Wendell Minnick
Dubai – Raytheon is offering a “fly-before-you-buy” deal for the new AGM-65H/K Maverick air-to-ground missile for the Middle East market.
“We’ve developed a replacement for the legacy TV-guided Maverick, the Maverick H/K,” said Mark Larson, Maverick business development manager for Raytheon Missile Systems.
Larson said the company is offering customers a loan option.
“We’ll loan an H/K seeker to countries with the TV-guided Maverick in their
inventory. They can put the upgraded seeker on their own aircraft, and do a side-by-side comparison with the TV-guided variant.”
Raytheon has already done this in East Asia and the “feedback … has been very positive.”
There is now interest in the “fly-before-you-buy” program in the Middle East.
The H/K uses a charge couple device seeker, which enables aviators to acquire the target at significantly greater distances then possible with the older Mavericks.
“We’ve also done software upgrades to the H/K’s seeker, which improves target lock-on capability, particularly with shadows near the intended target.”
“A large number of countries in the Middle East currently have Maverick in their inventories, but the systems are often legacy systems,” Larson said.
The system is modular and the center and aft section, basically the warhead and rocket motor, have an “indefinite service life.”
“Instead of buying an entirely new missile and paying for integration, training and the cost of establishing a new logistics base,” Larson suggests simply upgrading the older Maverick’s guidance and control section. This allows the customer to get an enhanced capability at a “fraction” of the price tag of a new missile.
“We want people attending the Dubai Air Show to know that with the new upgrades we’re offering and Raytheon’s track record of total life-cycle support, Maverick can offer the war fighter a great deal of combat-proven capability at a very affordable price.”
Maverick is integrated on more than 25 platforms in 33 countries, and has been used in combat more than 6,000 times with a 93 percent success rate.
