EuroFIRST PIRATE

[1] It is produced by the EuroFIRST consortium consisting of Leonardo S.p.A. of Italy (lead contractor and design and technical authority), Thales Land & Joint Systems of the UK, and Tecnobit of Spain.

[2][3][4] The system is mounted on the port side of the fuselage, forward of the windscreen and provides passive and thus undetectable and unjammable means of long range surveillance.

[5] PIRATE detects infrared radiation generated from the heat of an aircraft's skin, either through air friction or hot parts such as engines.

[7] In September 1992, Thorn-EMI (now Thales) finally won the tender with Italy's FIAR (now Leonardo) and Spain's Eurotronica for the infrared sensor of the Eurofighters, based on the Air Defence Alerting Device (ADAD),[4] and went on to form the EuroFirst consortium.

[11] In the air-air role, the equipment passively detects, tracks, classifies and prioritizes multiple airborne targets under all aspects, look-up, look-down and co-altitude conditions.

[9] The IRST functions are fully integrated into the aircraft attack and identification sub-system and can be diverted to specific search and track areas as a result of commands on the communication bus.