U.S. Navy buys another carrier air traffic radar from Saab

The U.S. Navy is buying one more AN/SPN-50 shipboard air traffic control radar from Saab under a $14.3 million contract option, adding to a growing fleet of new radars that track and guide aircraft around aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships.

Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Maryland, exercised the option on Saab Inc.’s existing contract, with the work to be done at the company’s facility in East Syracuse, New York, and completed by June 2028. The unit is a low-rate initial production radar, and the full $14.3 million comes from fiscal 2027 Navy procurement funds obligated at the time of award, which was made on a sole-source basis.

The AN/SPN-50(V)1 is a U.S. version of Saab’s Sea Giraffe Agile Multi Beam radar and serves as the primary air traffic control surveillance radar for both crewed and unmanned aircraft aboard Nimitz-class carriers and large-deck amphibious assault ships. Shipboard air traffic controllers use it to identify, marshal and direct aircraft within about 50 nautical miles (93 km) of the ship, handling sequencing and separation, safety alerts, traffic advisories and guidance into final approach.

The new radar replaces the AN/SPN-43C, an S-band air traffic radar that has served on U.S. Navy ships since the mid-1960s. Part of the push to retire the older system came from spectrum changes: regulators reassigned the top quarter of the SPN-43C’s frequency band to commercial fixed wireless use, which restricts the legacy radar’s operation within 50 nautical miles of the coast.

Saab first won the program in 2016 with a $38 million engineering and manufacturing development contract covering three radars over four years. Later orders included a $25 million contract in 2020 for two units destined for USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) and the amphibious assault ship Bougainville (LHA 8), a $47.5 million order in December 2023 for three more systems and a $41.7 million contract in October 2024 for another three.

The latest award follows a $74.6 million modification in August 2026 for five more SPN-50(V)1 radars, with work split between Syracuse and Gothenburg, Sweden. The Navy has planned to procure 25 SPN-50 radars in total, and with this option the newest low-rate production unit is scheduled for completion in June 2028.