BAE SYSTEMS Nimrod MRA4 - Flight Deck & Radar Station

The Nimrod MRA4 Flight Deck was the latest development from the
Airbus 340 family with additional panels for Weapons Controls and a
Tactical Situation Display. This technology allowed a two pilot
operation without the Flight Engineer but with some input from the
Route Navigator. All the main systems were controlled by four Utility
Systems Management Computers.
The role of the Pilot had increased considerably being responsible for
Engineering, Navigation and monitoring of the Tactical Command
System. To help reduce workload, they could also access additional
information fed from the aircraft sensors including the Link, Weather
Radar and information from the Tactical Command System. This meant more reliance on the Autopilot System which was constantly updated to allow a large high performance aircraft to function down to extremely low levels in a hostile environment.

The aircraft Radar sensors included the Thales Searchwater 2000MR multimode search radar. This radar provided pulse Doppler modes for air-to-air search and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for ground mapping and an Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) for identifying targets.
The main radar modes included Maritime Reconnaissance, Weather, Air to Air (TCAS - Traffic Collision Avoidance) and IFF (Interrogation Friend or Foe). The Searchwater 2000MR could fuse and interweave some of these modes to produce revealing three dimensional images which arguably delivered the best maritime radar in the world.