#46 - Wedgetail E-7A, a peek inside

An E-7A Wedgetail Advanced Early Warning & Control aircraft is not your typical Boeing 737. Instead of costing around $90M US, it's more like $750M--each! Instead of carrying 2 pilots and roughly 150 passengers, it carries 12 people total. 

So what's going on inside there?

Let's walk through the plane a bit from nose to tail.

The cockpit is mostly a very standard two-seat cockpit that you might find in any Boeing 737, with a lavatory close behind it.

There the similarity stops. 

Walking aft from the entry door and you pass between the backs of chairs facing sideways toward workstations mounted along the hull. The do turn forward for take-off and landing operations. In order:

Main Cabin

On your right you will pass six side-facing workstations:

• Flight Operations Officer: sits closest to the cockpit and commands the aircraft itself and, with the communications technician, oversees the smooth operation in flight
• Mission Commander: typically a colonel or similar with absolute command authority
• Senior Surveillance Officer: oversees the rest of the crew and the flow of information to the Mission Commander
• 3 more desks of surveillance operators

On the left:

• several cabinets of communications gear for interfacing with ground, other aircraft, and satellites
• the first seat is the communications tech sitting close by the equipment
• 3 more desks of surveillance operators for a total crew of ten + two pilots

Continuing aft:

• More communications cabinets (there's a lot of electronics aboard, like $600M worth)
• A small galley
• A six-seat crew rest area (I didn't find any evidence of additional crew being there to rotate through duty stations, but it's possible)
• And then a door that stays closed.
• Past the door is the electronics to handle the Top Hat radar that can resolve everything from a stray ship to a ballistic missile departing the atmosphere to LEO (Low Earth Orbit, reaching 4-5x higher than the orbit of the International Space Station).

Outside the plane there are a vast array of antennas attached to the plane. Toward the rear, there are also a pair of ventral fins that help to counterbalance the drag of the large Top Hat radar atop the aircraft.

And if you want to dig even deeper, here's a cool quick tour of the inside:

 And if you want to read what I did with it, read Wedgetail: