And thereby hangs a tale:
The Seahawk midlife upgrade and life extension project (AIR 9000 Ph. 3) was to address aircraft capabilities, through life support costs, operational availability, commonality and life of type issues.
It was well understood that the processing power of the aircraft's mission system would be a major focus of the upgrade, since the original system-the one that took six years to bring to full functionality-was incapable of supporting new, associated systems such as enhanced acoustic capabilities, a new radar, and the integration of advanced weapon systems.
The upgrade was then reined in and Phase 3 replaced by the Seahawk Capability Assurance Program (SCAP1 & 2).
SCAP1, which is current, addresses immediate Seahawk obsolescence issues including tactical displays, engine controls, automatic flight control, IFF and the mission simulator.
SCAP2 was primarily concerned with resolving obsolescence in the Seahawk's main mission computer, the Display Generator Unit (DGU).
The focus of SCAP2 was on replacing the system and ignoring DSTO's considerable work on relifing the Seahawk DGU through the application of emulation technology.
And the arguments for emulating, rather than replacing, the Seahawk DGU, we thought, were compelling.
We suspect that it all became too hard and the cancellation no doubt drew sighs of relief from project staff and perhaps some regrets by DSTO's Dr Mark Davies and his colleagues who had done so much work on Seahawk DGU emulation techniques.