CIT to help bring Ball Aerospace antenna technology to commercial aviation

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla., – Carlisle Interconnect Technologies (CIT) announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Ball Aerospace to bring a new satellite communications (SATCOM) antenna to the commercial aviation marketplace.

Currently, the Ball AIRLINK L-band and X-band antennas fly on more than 1,600 aircraft, and Ball has successfully tested its first-generation AIRLINK Ku- and Ka-band products with geostationary Earth orbit and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. CIT will leverage Ball’s second-generation of fully electronically steerable phased array antennas. These second-generation Ball antennas have been designed for commercial production using Ball Aerospace’s innovative sub-array antenna architecture–An electronically steerable flat panel array building block designed to be tiled with other sub-arrays to form a SATCOM terminal.

CIT’s role will include delivering a diverse global manufacturing footprint, aircraft integration and electronics packaging experience, and global airworthiness regulatory expertise both for new aircraft production and Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) retrofits.