Germany's Traffic 2000, Hughes Team for International HISAR Program.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 14, 1997--Germany's Traffic 2000 GmbH and Hughes Aircraft Co. Tuesday announced that they have signed a formal teaming agreement to pursue commercial applications of the Hughes Integrated Surveillance and Reconnaissance System (HISAR).

Under terms of the agreement, Hughes and Traffic 2000 will pursue HISAR-based traffic and environmental monitoring, geodata bank and telecommunications relays in the European marketplace. Traffic 2000 will provide aircraft and air-operations market visibility and connections, while Hughes will develop and integrate technology specific to Traffic 2000's requirements.

``It's great to be teaming with Hughes Aircraft Co. We look forward to many successes,'' said Bernhard Hartmann, chief executive officer of Traffic 2000. This partnership occurred after Traffic 2000 had analyzed a field of potential teammates. Said Hartmann, ``We came to Hughes after a very thorough analysis of who could work best with us in developing future business.''

``We already have worked together under a feasibility analysis and demonstration contact,'' said Hughes Aircraft's HISAR capture team leader Justin Monger. ``We flew more than 20 hours of missions over Germany during July to demonstrate the system's capabilities to monitor traffic on Germany's autobahns and to detect oil spills on the open seas.

``In fact, during controlled testing in the North Sea, we detected a spill as small as 10 gallons,'' Monger said.

The demonstration flights occurred during a break in the HISAR/King Air World Tour, being conducted jointly with Hughes Aircraft Co. and Raytheon Aircraft Co. using a Beechcraft King Air 200. It began in June at the Paris Air Show and went on to the International Defense Exposition in Turkey in September. The system's next public appearance will be at the Dubai Air Show in November.

The Sensors & Communications Systems segment of Hughes has developed the HISAR system starting with the all-weather, day or night SAR (synthetic aperture radar), derived from the same family of radars used on the U-2 spy plane and the B-2 bomber. A range of options that includes Forward Looking Infrared, Long-Range Optical Sensors, Signals Intelligence sensors and a variety of radios, datalinks and ground stations, also has been added.

``We've taken the cutting-edge military technologies that Hughes is justly famous for and created a customized, affordable, lightweight package that can be integrated into a broad variety of aircraft for use by international customers,'' said Monger.

``In working with potential international customers, we learned they wanted more than a ground-mapping radar, so we've put together a suite of complementary sensors that can be customized to fill a variety of missions, from remote sensing and maritime patrol to border surveillance and military reconnaissance,'' Monger said.

The U.S. State Department has granted export approval for most elements of the system to many countries, and Hughes experts will respond quickly to any requests for additional licensing.

The radar weighs about 545 pounds, including an airborne work station, and is designed to be installed on almost any aircraft, from business-class turboprops and executive jets to the de Havilland Dash-7 and the P-3 Orion.

Features of the radar include a wide-area moving-target indicator (MTI) mode that can detect moving targets in a 6,200- square-mile area in a wedge ranging from 18 to 75 km, a combined SAR/MTI strip mode with 20-foot resolution over a swath 23 miles wide at ranges of 12 to 68 mi, a SAR spot mode with 6-foot resolution covering six square miles, and a sea-surveillance mode.

The electro-optical and infrared sensors are capable of detecting, tracking, recognizing and identifying images at 33 miles.

``With our modular approach, you can also customize HISAR into the backbone of a very capable C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) system,'' Monger said.

Variants of the HISAR package already are operational in the U.S. Army's Airborne Reconnaissance Low-Multifunction system and are in flight test for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Global Hawk High Altitude Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.

Hughes Aircraft is a unit of Hughes Electronics Corp. The earnings of Hughes Electronics are used to calculate the earnings per share attributable to GMH (NYSE symbol) common stock.

CONTACT: Hughes Aircraft Co., El Segundo

Kearney Bothwell, 310/334-1665

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