Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

NASA has tested wing folding in flight, a technique that could reduce tail size and therefore drag in subsonic aircraft.

Britain’s Royal Air Force is re-opening a radar station in the Shetland Islands to boost regional radar coverage in response to increased sorties flown by Russian long-range aviation.

The Pentagon’s leading contractor by sales plans to spend more on venture capital investments and workforce development, among other priorities.

View the U.S. Defense Department Spending: Nuclear Weapons Facilities: FY16-FY18($K) chart in PDF format.

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The U.S. Air Force finally is ready to welcome its second female F-35 pilot, now that enough aircraft have been upgraded with a new ejection seat designed to accommodate lightweight aircrew.

The small fleet of fixed-wing light attack aircraft is being provided to Beirut as U.S. military aid to support counterterrorism missions.

A scheduled Jan. 29 spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) originally scheduled by NASA to complete a complex series of upgrades to the station’s crucial robot arm has been postponed.

Boeing recently finished two weeks of flight testing as part of its wide-ranging modernization program for the fourth-generation aerial combat jet.

An Australian Boeing EA-18G Growler suffered serious damage during an exercise at the U.S. Nellis Air Force Base on Jan. 27 and may have to be replaced.

The first of 15 Hurkus-Bs being built for the Turkish Air Force for primary and advanced flight training took to the air from Konya air base on Jan. 29.

NORTHROP GRUMMAN has $12.5m U.S. Army contract for Hunter UAV engineering services.

The nonprofit Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (Casis) is holding a Jan. 30 public board meeting “to review the progress and future of research” aboard the orbiting facility.

View the Aviation Week Forecasts: Western Military Aircraft Primes/Integrators By ISF: 2018-2027 chart in PDF format.

Last May, the U.S. Air Force loaded up three Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bombers with 30,000-lb. earth-penetrating bombs and sent them on a test mission against a single target at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The new Northrop Grumman division housing Orbital ATK will be called Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and will be led by Blake Larson, currently Orbital’s chief operating officer.

Schweizer RSG has declared plans to restart production of the Schweizer 300 helicopter after buying rights to the aircraft from Sikorsky.

Japan for the first time deployed a Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning to an operational base on Jan. 26.

Arianespace suffered from two mishaps Jan. 25 in its first launch of 2018, when the Ariane 5 rocket lost its telemetry link with the ground and placed both of its payload satellites into the wrong orbit.

India has begun a fresh hunt to acquire mid-air refueling aircraft.

The aircraft arrived at the RTAF’s Takhli base in Nakhon Sawan province, 240 km (140 mi) northwest of Bangkok on Jan. 25, 17 days after they left South Korea for the ferry flight.

An amateur astronomer looking for the lost Zuma satellite instead found a NASA science satellite known as IMAGE, which disappeared from radar tracking on Dec. 18, 2005.

EFW INC. has $12.6m U.S. Army contract for a Apache aviator integrated helmets and associated spare parts.

Russia’s most Su-57 fighter jet—formerly the T-50 demonstrator—has begun flights with air-launched weapons, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.

A U.S. appeals court decision may allow the U.S. Army to move forward with a sole-source purchase of UH-72 helicopters from Airbus.