IAI announces first delivery of new Multi-Mode, Multi-Role Airborne Surveillance Radar

C-catcher Multi-Mode, Multi-Role Airborne Surveillance Radar. (IAI)

The radar will be presented at NAVDEX 2025 next week

Israel Aerospace Industries has delivered its new C-catcher Multi-Mode, Multi-Role Airborne Surveillance Radar to a strategic customer.

With over one thousand units delivered and in service in thirty-five countries, the C catcher predecessor, the ELM-2022 Airborne Surveillance Radar, established IAI ELTA as an industry leader. The new C-catcher ELM-2025 radar family leverages the company’s extensive accumulated operational experience and the latest technologies to improve performance and reliability.

The new follow-on C-catcher Radar family employs the latest GaN (Gallium Nitride) AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) technologies, thus providing high performance and very high reliability in a compact package.

The C-catcher interleaving detection modes, together with powerful processing capability, afford simultaneous multi-mode, multi-role, capabilities for air-to-sea, air-to-ground and air-to-air missions. This functional adaptability enables the C-catcher to effectively perform comprehensive surveillance tasks, making it especially useful in dynamic environments requiring agility and extended operational capabilities. Powerful digital processing and advanced algorithms endow the C-catcher with best-in-class detection of small targets from high altitudes, particularly in high sea states. Moreover, the radar’s SAR and ISAR modes offer enhanced resolution, improving target classification capabilities over previous designs.

The C-catcher is supplied in both fixed and rotating configurations suitable for fixed wing aircraft, (business jet/ transport /turboprops), helicopters, and the growing market of UAVs and VTOLs. All configurations are especially adept at performing wide-area maritime surveillance from high altitudes and speeds to detect, track and classify thousands of objects in real-time.

IAI VP and ELTA CEO, Dror Bar: „Airborne Surveillance Radars play a key role in national security and defense. IAI ELTA engineers strive to design, develop and build advanced systems that deliver class-leading performance, operational flexibility and reliability. The new C catcher radar family leverages everything we have learned in more than thirty-five years of continual operations. We are proud of these powerful systems and are certain that they will continue our proven airborne surveillance radar legacy.“

Here is a link to a video of the C-catcher: