To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) NOv. 19 - 20 — Modern Warrior Demo Days 2013, Fort Benning, Ga. For more information go to www.idga.org/events.cfm?filter=1005/ NOv. 19 - 20 — 2nd Annul Cargo Security Summit, Baltimore, MD. For more information go to www.idga.org/events.cfm?filter=1005/
Phobos, the small irregularly shaped moon of Mars whose origins remain a mystery, may offer a repository for small amounts of soil and rock originating from the red planet, according to a study by Brown University scientists associated with Russia’s failed 2011 Phobos-Grunt sample return mission.
NEW DELHI — The INS Vikramaditya, a Russian-built aircraft carrier refitted for the Indian navy, will leave Russian territorial waters and head for India on Nov. 30 following a more than five-year delay, a defense ministry official says. The 44,570-ton, 284-meter-long (932-ft.) warship, a refurbished version of the Russian Kiev-class Admiral Gorshkov, is expected to take about two months to arrive in India after its Nov. 16 commissioning. It will be based in Karwar Naval base, in the southern state of Karnataka.
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In the wake of a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report sparked by Aviation Week Intelligence Network (AWIN) stories, the U.S. Navy is striving for better cost estimates for its future Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).
The U.S. Air Force’s upcoming Operationally Responsive Space-3 (ORS-3) demonstration, poised for launch Nov. 19 from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Va., is aimed at demonstrating a bevy of new technologies, as well as “commercial-like” launch processes that could reduce the cost of future national security space missions.
NEW DELHI — India has taken delivery of its second P-8I aircraft from Boeing, doubling its long-range maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare capabilities. Boeing is building eight P-8Is for India and delivered the first in May. Based on the company’s 737 commercial airframe, the P-8I is the Indian navy variant of the P-8A Poseidon that Boeing has developed for the U.S. Navy.
ALL BETS OFF: As the Pentagon continues forming its budget plans for fiscal 2015, it is preparing for the possibility of a second round of automatic budget cuts mandated by Congress, according to the Defense Department’s top budget official, Robert Hale. That’s a far cry from a year ago, before the first round of budget cuts known as sequestration had taken hold, when Hale bet Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a bottle of scotch that the cuts would never be realized.
AgustaWestland is in the process of certifying a new Lidar-based Obstacle Detection System for use on its AW139 medium twin-engined helicopter. The Obstacle Proximity Lidar System (OPLS) uses Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) sensors to warn the pilot both aurally and visually of obstacles in the vicinity of the blades of the helicopter acting like parking sensors on an automobile.
Much of the U.S. defense community “has lost sight of reality” as to what stealth means, a Raytheon executive told a high-level conference on combat aircraft in London Nov. 13. In a presentation to the Defense IQ International Fighter Conference, Michael Garcia, the company’s senior business development manager for active, electronically scanned array radars, suggested that longer-range sensors and weapons should be part of stealth, rather than placing near-complete reliance on reduced radar cross section (RCS).
A full-scale 757 tail, equipped with active flow control, has demonstrated increased rudder effectiveness in wind-tunnel tests by Boeing and NASA that could lead to smaller, lower-drag vertical tails. The four weeks of tests in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamic Facility at NASA Ames Research Center, Calif., evaluated the use of active flow control (AFC) to increase rudder sideforce on demand by delaying airflow separation over the deflected control surface.
Lockheed Martin is closing and consolidating several U.S. facilities and laying off 4,000 employees in what the company calls an effort “to increase the efficiency of its operations and improve the affordability of its products and services” in light of continued reductions in U.S. government spending. The cuts will leave the company with 112,000 employees. The company’s workforce has been reduced 23% since 2008, when it employed 146,000.
BEIJING — South Korea plans to introduce more than 20 former U.S. Navy S-3 Vikings into service in 2018-20 as second-tier maritime patrollers, apparently in response to the loss of a warship to a North Korean submarine attack three years ago.
LONDON — A senior F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program manager told a London conference Nov. 13 that he was “cautiously optimistic” the project would get better grades in the next report of the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, due early next year. However, he added that on-time delivery of the Block 3F software — which meets the requirements set at the start of the program -— was still dependent on how well the program performs on the interim 2B and 3I packages.
To protect against a gap in U.S. weather satellite data collection, a team reviewing progress on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s (NOAA) satellite program is recommending the weather monitoring department rapidly purchase additional sensors.
Globalstar, Inc. will market a personal anti-theft device, SPOT Trace, designed for safeguarding vehicles or other valuables using satellite communications and global positioning technologies.
CASCINA COSTA, Italy — AgustaWestland is planning to begin certification flights for its AW609 commercial tiltrotor in early 2014. The company is closing in on the end of envelope exploration trials using the first and second prototypes of the aircraft. The first is based in Arlington, Texas, and the second at Cascina Costa, AgustaWestland’s main test facility near Milan.
The partnership approach NASA used to spur development of two commercial cargo vehicles for International Space Station logistics can hold down the cost of future development, the agency and its commercial partners said in a ceremony marking the official end of the program Nov. 13. But the agency has no solid plans to apply it beyond the commercial crew development effort already underway, and that work is drawing fire.
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