E-2 Hawkeye
ICAO E2The carrier air wing's radar aircraft — a turboprop with a rotating disc. Live E-2 Hawkeye positions.
Flying right now
Live · 30sAirframe
- Manufacturer
- Northrop Grumman
- Role
- Carrier-based airborne early warning
- Class
- L2T — Landplane, 2 turboprop engines
- Crew
- 5
- First flight
- 21 October 1960
- In service
- 1964
Operators airborne
About the E-2 Hawkeye
The E-2 does what an E-3 does, from a ship. Fitting a long-range radar aircraft onto a carrier deck imposed every constraint at once: it had to be small, fold its wings, take a catapult launch and an arrested landing, and still carry a rotating radar disc bigger than the fuselage is wide.
It has been in service since 1964 and is still in production, which puts it in the same rare category as the Chinook. The current E-2D Advanced Hawkeye has a new radar, an in-flight refuelling probe and glass cockpit.
France, Japan, Taiwan and Egypt fly it from land as well. Appearances here are sporadic — carrier aircraft transmit selectively, and the fleet is small.
Callsign prefixes
- NAVY
- US Navy Hawkeye flights
- STLJW
- A recurring US Navy training block
How to recognise it
- —A rotating radar disc above a twin-turboprop with four fins on the tailplane.
- —Four fins is unique — the height limit of a carrier hangar forced the tail to spread sideways instead of up.
- —Small: about the length of a regional turboprop, with a very wide disc.
Common questions
+ Why does the E-2 have four tail fins?
Carrier hangar decks have a hard height limit, so the tail could not be made tall enough as a single fin. Spreading the same area across four short fins gave the required stability within the height available.
+ Is the E-2 the same as the C-2 Greyhound?
They share the wing, engines and much of the structure. The C-2 is the cargo version with a widened fuselage and no radar, used to carry people and freight to carriers. It is being replaced by the CMV-22 Osprey.
+ How is the E-2 different from an E-3?
Scale. The E-3 is a four-engine jet with twenty people aboard doing full battle management; the E-2 is a five-crew turboprop that fits on a ship and covers the airspace around a carrier group.