A method and system to rapidly, passively, range and track maneuvering airborne emitters (enemy targets and threats) for tactical fighters using batch based recursive estimators for track initialization and track maintenance that includes providing information processing that has angle and signal amplitude data, threat database, and feedback from pilot cue analysis. The system includes pilot cue analysis which computes airborne emitter (target and threat) heading and corresponding accuracy to determine if sufficient accuracy is available to present the pilot with proper pilot cue options. The first stage is a range bank also called a compound parallel hypothesis evaluator and the second stage is an interactive multi-model. Both stages provide for the output of the algorithm to be a range measurement and an associated confidence factor. The algorithm inputs azimuth angle elevation angle and range and is capable of inputting data from three different data pre-processors (i.e., sensor data fusion).