Growth opportunities from the digital transformation of the commercial aviation sector will come from better airport, air traffic and airline operations, as well as through predictive maintenance and better asset tracking, Frost & Sullivan consultants said in a recent report.

The Pentagon advanced research agency plans to launch a program, called Blackjack, in fiscal 2019 to leverage commercial mass-production capabilities to demonstrate a proliferated smallsat constellation in low Earth orbit that can constantly keep track of “very large numbers” of targets.

Government auditors are warning the NASA-led James Webb Space Telescope is exhausting schedule and cost reserves.

Boeing has begun a three-year program in Australia to develop technologies for autonomous vehicles and deepen its understanding of how to satisfy regulators.

Raytheon has been selected by Lockheed Martin to produce electro-optical distributed aperture systems (EO-DAS) for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II.

Michigan-based Orbion is aiming to fly Hall effect thruster on smallsat in 2019.

Robinson Helicopter is stepping up studies of a diesel-powered variant of its R44 light helicopter as part of plans to hike performance and reduce fuel burn.

The 407 GXi introduces Garmin’s G1000H NXi integrated avionics suite and an up-rated version of the Rolls-Royce M250 turbine engine.