LONDON — Eurocopter’s Brazilian subsidiary Helibras has received permission to produce the Eurocopter EC225 helicopter domestically. Currently the EC225 is only built in France, but production of the EC225 in Brazil would pave the way for EC225s to support Brazil’s rapidly expanding oil and gas industry.
While leading U.S. Navy shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries CEO Michael Petters warns against cutting the national aircraft carrier force, he says it would be better to do so by building new advanced carriers like the CVN-78 Ford Class while foregoing midlife refuelings of existing ships and retiring those vessels. “This is a debate that’s always going on,” Petters told Wall Street investment analysts during an Aug. 7 conference call to discuss quarterly financial results.
The United Nations has tapped Selex ES to fly its Falco UAV to support peacekeeping duties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under a three-year, €10 million ($13 million) contract. The aircraft will be provided by Selex ES in the coming weeks, according to U.N. officials. The aircraft will be operated by Selex contractors under the control and security of the U.N., with all data from the platform provided exclusively to the peacekeeping mission. The contract has an option to be extended another three years.
Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope point to highly energetic mergers of binary neutron stars or neutron/black hole pairs as the source of mysterious, short-duration gamma-ray bursts. The findings, published online Aug. 3 in the journal Nature, address a mystery dating to the detection of powerful but unsourced gamma-ray flashes by U.S. Vela satellites placed in Earth orbit during the 1960s to document violations of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (signed by the U.S., the former USSR and the U.K.).
HAWK SIMS: Under subcontract to BAE Systems, CAE is to provide three full-mission simulators for the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) upgraded Hawk 127 lead-in fighter trainer. BAE is prime contractor for Project AIR 5438 Phase 1A to maintain the Hawk’s capability until its planned withdrawal from service in the mid- to late 2020s. The company was awarded a £90 million ($140 million) contract in July to upgrade the RAAF’s 33 Hawk 127s, ordered in 1997, to the same standard as the U.K. Royal Air Force’s newer Hawk T2s.
General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems has successfully completed the comprehensive risk reduction program for the U.S. Navy’s Knifefish surface mine countermeasure unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV) program. Designed to discover any potential systems defect early on in the program’s development phase, the configuration item test (CIT) successfully verified key components within the UUV system, including the hardware architecture and critical areas of hardware and software integration, the company says.
Lockheed Martin expects to lease its S301 Special Operations Forces dry combat submersible by the end of September, says Stephen Froelich, director and general manager of mission and unmanned systems. “We are just getting done classifying that for [the] military to use it,” he says.” We expect to be under lease by the end of September. They are contracting for 18 months initially, but could go longer.” “Lockheed can make modifications to the submarine as needed and to maintain classification,” he says.
The U.S. Navy continued to hone its at-sea surface-to-air missile skills with a set of special exercises earlier this month. The guided-missile cruiser CG-58 USS Philippine Sea and the DDG-103 USS Truxtun simultaneously launched Navy Standard Missile-2s (SM-2s) while DDG-80 USS Roosevelt launched shortly afterward during the so-called Missilx exercise.
Deactivating the USS Miami Los Angeles-class attack submarine could cause ripples — some good and others challenging — through the rest of the U.S. Navy’s sub fleet force structure. In announcing the Navy’s decision to forego fixing the Miami — whose innards were recently scorched in an arsonist-set fire — Rear Adm. Rick Breckenridge, director of Undersea Warfare, acknowledged in an Aug. 7 media briefing that the service hopes to shift some of the money slated for Miami repair work to other subs.
An aerostat-based cruise-missile defense system has now demonstrated compatibility with the U.S. services’ main land-, sea- and air-launched anti-aircraft weapons. The Raytheon-developed Joint Land Attack Cruise-Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (Jlens) passed targeting data to a U.S. Air Force Boeing F-15E via Link 16, enabling the fighter to intercept a surrogate anti-ship cruise missile with an AIM-120C7 advanced medium-range air-to-air missile.
Lockheed Martin plans to begin flexible-wing control flights of the X-56A experimental unmanned aircraft after initial “stiff-wing” flights to validate the vehicle’s performance. The 28-ft.-span, 480-lb., twinjet-powered X-56A made its 14-min. first flight from NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB, Calif., on July 26 (Aerospace DAILY, Aug. 2). The aircraft is designed to demonstrate active flutter-suppression and gust-load alleviation to enable longer, lighter, lower-drag wings for transport and unmanned aircraft.
The U.S. Air Force will take a “sober look at technology” in proceeding with the congressionally mandated 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and “everything is on the table” in terms of trades among programs and capabilities, the senior officer in charge of the effort says.
MAVEN PREPARED: NASA’s next Mars spacecraft is at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., being prepared for its November launch aboard at Atlas V -401 rocket. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) spacecraft was flown to Kennedy on Aug. 2 from Buckley AFB, Colo., near Lockheed Martin’s facility in Littleton, where it was built.
The Russian government has signed a 12.6 billion ruble ($380 million) deal to purchase 40 Mi-8AMTSh armed transport helicopters from Russian Helicopters for the country’s army aviation organization. Reports suggest the deal was signed on Aug. 3 by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yury Borisov and Russian Helicopters CEO Dmitry Petrov, with deliveries due to begin next year.
Air Transportation Modernization Conference September 9-11, 2013 The Dupont Circle Hotel Washington, D.C. Re-Defining NextGen: -- Setting Priorities -- Implementing Capabilities -- Delivering Benefit
Boeing’s 702 Small Platform electric satellite series has cleared its critical design review, permitting the first spacecraft to move into the assembly phase and remain on schedule for launch in the first quarter of 2015.
BEIJING — Attempting to acquire 60 highly capable fighters within a limited budget, South Korea is calling for a further and final round of bids for the F-X Phase 3. The program will be reconsidered if all three bidders again exceed the 8.3 trillion won ($7.2 billion) budget, as they did in their initial offers, local media report.
Two Lockheed Martin F-35Bs are heading to the USS Wasp amphibious assault ship for the second round of developmental testing (DT) trials associated with the aircraft’s unique ability to conduct vertical landings and short takeoffs in support of the U.S. Marine Corps. The trials are slated to take three weeks and will begin Aug. 12 on the Wasp, according to a defense official. In addition to the two primary aircraft assigned to the testing, one will serve as a backup.
