AC-130 Laser Weapon Test Slip Raises Questions About Its Future
The future of a laser-armed AC-130J is increasingly uncertain and a broader review of the Ghostrider’s armament package is in progress.
BY
JOSEPH TREVITHICK
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PUBLISHED NOV 10, 2023 3:21 PM EST
The schedule for long-planned flight testing of an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship with a laser directed energy weapon has slipped again to 2024.
Planned flight testing of a high-energy laser directed energy weapon on a U.S. Air Force AC-130J Ghostrider gunship has been pushed back again to next year. This once looked set to be the service's first operational airborne laser weapon. However, the future of this project is ever more uncertain and there is now a broader review of the Ghostrider's armament suite that could see the aircraft lose their 105mm howitzers in the future.
Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) has confirmed to The War Zone that flight tests of the Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) on the AC-130J are now set to start in January 2024 and wrap up in June of that year. The goal had originally been for the AHEL to take to the sky on a Ghostrider sometime in the 2022 Fiscal Year. Most recently, the hope had been that this would occur before the end of this year.
ct since 2019 to build, deliver, and integrate the AHEL onto an AC-130J. AFSOC, which has been operating with the U.S. Navy's Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWC Dahlgren) on this project, received the laser weapon system, which is in the 60-kilowatt power class, back in 2021. The Navy has been a leader within the U.S. military in the development and fielding of laser directed energy weapons of various types, including the 60-kilowatt class High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) design, another Lockheed Martin product.
The exact reason or reasons for the latest delay are unclear. There have been indications that the integration of the laser onto the AC-130J has turned out to be more complicated than originally expected. Earlier this year, an Air Force official told The War Zone that there might be a need for “quite a bit of additional testing” when it came to integrating the AHEL onto the Ghostrider due in part to other modifications required to bring those aircraft up to the latest Block 30 standard, which you can read more about here.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ac-130-laser-tests-slip-raising-questions-about-its-future
