The Lockheed Martin CATBird is a highly modified

Boeing The Boeing Company () is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and p ...

737-330 designed as an

avionics Avionics (a blend of ''aviation'' and ''electronics'') are the electronic systems used on aircraft. Avionic systems include communications, navigation, the display and management of multiple systems, and the hundreds of systems that are fit ...

flight testbed aircraft. The name is an adaptive acronym, from ''Cooperative Avionics Test Bed''; ''CATBIRD'' is Lockheed's ICAO-designated company callsign. The aircraft was modified in order to provide an economic means of developing and flight testing the avionics suite for the Lockheed Martin

F-35 Lightning II The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is an American family of single-seat, single-engine, all-weather stealth multirole combat aircraft that is intended to perform both air superiority and strike missions. It is also able to provide elect ...

. CATBird has a distinctive appearance, with an F-35's nose and a pair of small canards located just aft of the forward entrance doors. Inside, the aircraft is equipped with racks to hold all of F-35's avionics, as well as an F-35 cockpit. The aircraft was modified under contract by BAE Systems Inc. at their facility at the

Mojave Spaceport The Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field is in Mojave, California, United States, at an elevation of . It is the first facility to be licensed in the United States for horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft, being certified as a spa ...

. Work began in December, 2003, and the aircraft began post-modification taxi tests in November 2006. First flight took place on January 23, 2007 at Mojave. After the initial flight test program conducted at Mojave, on March 2, 2007, the aircraft was ferried to Lockheed's Fort Worth facility for Phase 2 of the modification program, which would install the flight test stations and actual avionics and sensor systems to be tested."CATBird transitions to Lockheed for final systems installation", ''Aerotech News and Review'', 2007-03-09 In 2014 the CATBird's software test station was upgraded by

Northrop Grumman Northrop Grumman Corporation is an American multinational aerospace and defense technology company. With 90,000 employees and an annual revenue in excess of $30 billion, it is one of the world's largest weapons manufacturers and military techn ...

with Tech Refresh 2 hardware which gives the CATBird capability to test F-35 Block 3 Software.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lockheed Martin Catbird Mojave Air and Space Port Individual aircraft

See also

References